Learning How to Create Engaging Training Videos 

Learning how to create engaging training videos that keep your audience actively involved in the lessons that you’re teaching while maintaining consistency across the materials that you teach is key to initiating a successful in-house training program. With proper planning, you can create powerfully engaging training videos that have the capacity to reduce your internal training costs by up to 95% while improving audience engagement and understanding, too.

At Beverly Boy Productions, we believe that video is the key to lifelong learning. Consumers watch an average of 5.5 hours of video each day between television, social media, and the internet. If even a fraction of that time is spent learning new subject matter or training to perform new tasks, adults will see greater successes in their lives. We want to help you foster a culture of learning among your organization. 

As an employer, learning how to create engaging training videos is an important step for you that goes along with creating a culture of education and learning within your organization. To increase audience engagement, improve understanding and retention of training content, and create consistent messaging across your business, follow these tips on learning how to create engaging training videos for your team.

1. Set Goals & Objectives for Your Training 

Before you begin a training video, you should have a set path of goals and objectives that you wish to achieve with the content you create. A single training video might have a very simple goal, but a series of training videos might be produced to achieve an overall objective or larger picture goal. Planning out your training needs, and defining the individual goals and objectives involved along the way is an excellent method of organizing your training content to maximize its effectiveness for your team.

As you define individual learning objectives, make sure that you have a clear, concise, and relevant learning objective for each training video that you produce or intend to produce. As a general rule, your video title should include the learning objective, too! This way, your audience knows what the expected outcome will be once they’ve watched the video.

2. Think About Why You’re Using a Training Video 

Goals and objectives are great, but carefully planning out WHY you’re using a training video and not a manual, in-person training, or some other means of teaching to deliver the content is important, too. As you think about why you’re using a training video over any other medium for your training, make sure that you’re considering:

• The story or background behind the lesson or training.
• The learning styles of your audience and how your training video is going to accommodate each learning style.
• Whether human interaction is important to this particular concept that you are training on.
• The motivation behind this particular training session.
• Whether there are physical steps or processes that should be addressed ahead of, or after, this training session.

To keep your training videos engaging, this is also a good time to start thinking about how you might be able to incorporate drama, humor, or other entertaining elements into your video content in order to keep your audience actively engaged. 

3. Use Animations for Improved Understanding

Training videos that incorporate the use of animations into the context are often easier to follow and more likely to be remembered. Animated training videos engage the audience through the use of text, shapes, objects, and fun characters or customized animations that can make even the most complicated subjects and storylines simple and easy to understand. The creativity behind moving text and shapes or various other graphics that can be utilized in an animated training video will often result in the audience finding additional value in the content, it will keep them engaged and interested, and it’s more likely that they’ll recall what they learn.

4. Include Annotations & Captions for Added Simplification

Learning how to create engaging training videos is really all about simplifying the subject so that your audience will fully understand what you’re teaching or training them to do. Annotations, like text and arrows that point to critical components of the video content or which highlight specific wording used during narration can help visual learners grasp concepts and focus their attention on key subjects of importance. 

Captures are another great opportunity to engage the audience. They’re especially useful for videos that might be consumed in settings where sound isn’t acceptable. Whether you choose to include captions throughout the entire video, or you prefer to have the captions be turned on or off at the viewer’s discretion, they’re generally helpful for learners and add value to training videos!

5. Incorporate Decision-Making Scenarios into the Training

When it comes to learning how to create engaging training videos, one of the best steps that you can take is to incorporate decision-making scenarios into the training so that your audience stays focused on the content. There are a variety of ways to do this, depending on the technology that you’re using to create your training videos.  Some software refers to this as “Hot spots” where the viewer can actually pick or choose an answer to a question, a next step in a training scenario, or something entirely different. The goal is to spark the interest of the viewer, and allow him or her to make a decision that matters to the training. Ideal for use in branched-training scenarios and to ensure the users sees the immediate results of their decision-making, these types of opportunities have a strong impact on the viewer as he or she is able to gasp the training that is provided and understand the impact of their decision.

As you can see, when it comes to learning how to create engaging training videos, there are many steps that can be taken. Give Beverly Boy Productions a call to learn more about producing engaging training videos that you can use to foster a culture of learning & growth at your business.