How to make engaging employee training videos

Human memory is tricky. You may have heard that when people learn new information, they forget approximately 75% of it within two days. 

Research suggests that repetition is the key to boosting memory, and video makes rewatching (i.e., repetition) simple. By creating training videos for employees, you can increase the practice of repetition and help your team better retain knowledge, expand their skill set, and do their jobs better.

In this article, we’ll walk through everything you need to know when producing your employee training content. We’ve also included tips from learning and development professionals on how you can set every learner up for success.

What is a training video?

In a business context, a training video provides employees (both new and existing) with the guidance to learn a particular skill or area of knowledge.

When it comes to corporate training, the quality of content and the delivery method matters.
In order to make your training videos impactful and engaging to your staff, we have two main tips.

First, keep it short and sweet. If a video is under 60 seconds, 62% of viewers will watch it to the end. While longer videos may be packed with more information, they may not always be engaging for your audience. Only 26% of viewers will completely watch a video more than 20 minutes long. 

Second, you should consider video trends, like interactivity. When you create training videos for your employees, make sure you’re taking best practices, and your audience’s preferences and learning styles into account (more on this later).

The better the training, the more impact employees can have doing their jobs. By making video content short and sweet, you’re guaranteed to keep your audience’s attention. With interactivity, your team is brought into the story of the learning and helps cultivate an immersive learning environment. 

Investing in a robust training program with video can help your team feel more supported at work and fuel a positive employee experience.

Why make a corporate training video

One of the most important factors to consider during employee training video production is matching the right kind of training with the trainee. Most people are visual learners in some capacity — 90% of the information that is transmitted to your brain is visual in nature. However, people learn in all different ways, even within the medium of video.

Online training tools like videos can result in better information retention, higher engagement, and lower cost for training. Below, we’ve listed some of the top reasons businesses choose videos to train their workforce.

1. Easier to retain information

Video helps people recall information. Combining visual and auditory/verbal content allows learners to make more relevant connections and associations that assist with memory. 

One study shows that three days after learning, 65% of verbal/visual presentation (video, in this case) audiences can recall presentation information. Compared to only 10-20% who recall information that was spoken or given as a lecture, and 10% who recall only written information, it’s clear which method works best.

2. Higher engagement

People watch, on average, 17 hours of online video each week. Even branded video — 66% of consumers have viewed marketing content to learn about a product or brand.

When it comes to building brand advocates (which your employees should be), viewers are 52% more likely to share video than any other type of content. When you’re looking to create an engaging training experience, data says to look to video.

3. It’s cheaper

Since we’re talking about business here, one of the major benefits of using training videos instead of having in-person training sessions is that it keeps costs down — especially if you produce your own training videos.

In 2022, the Training Industry Report predicted a 6% increase in training budgets for this year and expected the global training market to grow by 2%. These days, remote training with video is about as useful as it can be — but you still need to maximize its benefits. 

So, what type of training video would be best for your organization? Let’s take a look at the different kinds you can use.

5 tips to master the art of online training videos

If you want to create the best training videos for your employees, there are a handful of considerations to keep top of mind. Our team chatted with Elizabeth Hodos and Emma Wisehart, Senior Sales Enablement Managers at Vimeo, to better understand what makes a successful video training program.

1. Understand training goals

The first step to making a great training video is matching the content to the learning outcome you want your employees to achieve. Before beginning the creation process, identify the main messages you’re trying to convey. For example, if you’re training a sales organization and want your sales team to learn how to create customer accounts using all the different tools in your tech stack, that means you’ll need videos that touch on your organization’s account setup process.

2. Make training content for all learner types

Employees’ ability to learn directly correlates with their ability to retain and apply the information they’ve recently acquired. Although there are additional (and hybrid) ways your team can learn, educators and leaders typically refer to four main styles:

• Reading/writing learners work well with text-based data and information through reading and/or writing. 
• Auditory learners excel when they’re able to listen to content.
• Kinesthetic learners are hands-on and rely on their tactile senses to learn.
• Visual learners — the most common type of learners — respond best to images, graphics, and video.

Video can actually help with all of these styles. For instance, you can supplement video with one-sheeters and other educational resources and activities.

3. Make training actionable

Learning means very little unless employees can put what they’ve learned into practice. When it comes to employee training videos, you want to design them to be actionable.

Leadership teams should immediately encourage employees to use what they’ve learned to reinforce their education. For example, once you’ve taught your employees how to use a tool from your company’s tech stack, make sure you provide a relevant test (or real-life) scenario for them to work through using the tool.

4. Identify knowledge gaps for learners

When an employee lacks the information they need to be able to complete an important business task, a knowledge gap forms. And if it’s not addressed quickly, it will lead to a skills gap and an inability to perform their job well.

To identify employee knowledge gaps, provide different types of skills assessments for them: pre-training, post-training, and self-assessments. Once employees receive the training they need, use video to share your company’s institutional knowledge. 

5. Find ways to track learning

With modern video production platforms, tracking video analytics is easier than ever. In fact, 83% of today’s companies use some form of analytics. Typically, organizations track functionalities like performance (views and engagements, for example) and CTA click-through rates.

For employee training videos, it’s important to see if your employees are watching all the way through and, if not, where they dropped off. Using this knowledge, you can make any necessary adjustments to your training materials.

6 types of training videos

When you’re creating employee training videos, you’ll quickly find out that certain skills are better learned through specific training approaches. Whether your video is lecture-style or an interactive presentation, each type of video serves a unique purpose in your training.

1. Tutorial videos

Tutorial or instructional videos can help your new employees understand step by step how to perform a certain task or follow a process. Great tutorial videos often include interactive visuals, quizzes, annotations, and more to help improve retention.

Even within tutorial videos, there are a couple of different approaches you can take, including:

• Animated videos. These are usually quite short and work well for data visualization, where having a real-life person explain might confuse viewers.
• How-tos. These are the most common type of instructional videos. These explain how to do something, usually in numbered steps.
• Demos. Similar to a “how-to,” demonstrations are what you’ll want to use if you want to show a process or product in action.

Tutorial videos are pretty flexible, and you can cover almost any topic with them.

2. Just-in-time training

Elizabeth Hodos, Senior Sales Enablement Manager at Vimeo, describes just-in-time learning as “serving up information for people when they need it.” She says the most important question to ask is, “What’s the one thing viewers need to remember?” 

With just-in-time training, employees are provided “microlearning” videos at specific touchpoints that help employees learn in the flow of work. This way, they’re more easily able to integrate what they’ve learned into their everyday roles. And since we already know about ol’ Ebbinghaus, we know it’s also important to serve up just-in-time training videos frequently because people will forget.

3. Live virtual trainings

The digital workforce is alive and well, as 97% of employees are open to onboarding virtually. And HR and onboarding teams agree — 69% find live video training to be most effective outside of in-person training. Creating a “virtual classroom” with a live streaming event can be a highly effective way to train a remote team. To best make use of your trainees’ time, consider including some pre-work in the form of presentation decks, reading material, visuals, or instructional video that your teams can sift through before meeting live. 

4. On-demand training

With on-demand training, employees can access video courses from wherever they want and at their own pace. On-demand training is also a great way to reuse and repurpose live training sessions that employees can catch later. Hosting your on-demand videos in a centralized place like a video library can help trainees search and find information quickly.

5. Interactive training

Interactive video is a way to let your employees interact with your training content within the video file itself. According to 47% of marketers, interactive video (and live streaming) is the most effective type of interactive content.

The main thing that sets interactive video apart from other video content is its nonlinear nature. Interactive video allows trainees to jump around and choose their own educational adventure.

6. Screencasts and screen recordings

Screencasts and screen recordings function the same way, but serve different types of training use cases. 

If you want to make short, quick explainer videos around a small computer-based task, screencasts or screen capture videos are for you.

For screencasts, presenters record their screen while explaining or performing a task. These recordings can be shared with specific team members who need them. And while quick explainers are the most obvious use case, there are a few others use cases including:

• Website walkthroughs
• HR explanations
• Project deep-dives
• Technical walkthroughs

These are also some of the easiest and budget-friendly types of training videos to produce and a great way to provide more training material for your team. 

Screen recording is great for capturing longer remote sessions like educational webinars. But if you have in-person presentations like product launches, you’ll also want to record those for playback.

Recording live events to keep inside your internal knowledge base is a great way to ensure valuable sessions are available for everyone, both for those who couldn’t attend and for future employees.

How to create an effective training video

So, now you know what benefits you can get from making training videos and what types you can create. Let’s take a look at the steps involved in training video production.

1. Choose a format

The very first step you need to take when producing a training video is to decide the format for it. Thinking about the types of videos we’ve already gone through, try to match one up with the type of training you want to provide.

One format, for example, can be using Vimeo Record. You can create a screencast-type training video walking the new employee through your customer interface.

However, if you want to use an animated instructional or interactive video (but you perhaps lack the skills of a professional animator), you can check out a Vimeo Create template for employee trainings.

Emma Wishart, Senior Sales Enablement Manager at Vimeo, shared the types of video learning content that work best for training sessions:

• Short-form video
• Repeatable, straightforward “process information” 
• Information that won’t change much (e.g., organizational definitions, etc.)
• Personalized content
• Marketing content that’s professional and inspirational
• Human-focused content

2. Film your video

So, here’s where you’ll start recording your training video unless you opt for an animated one (which you can make with Vimeo Create). In which case, at this step, you’ll be working through your template.

If you’re using Vimeo Record, all you’ll need to do is click on your Vimeo Record Chrome extension, decide if you’re recording just the screen, just the camera, or both, then hit Start Recording.

With other types of videos, like presentation captures or HR onboarding videos, you’ll likely want to invest in high-quality cameras. You might cringe at the initial costs, but you’ll be saving money in the long run since you only need to record these videos once.

3. Editing

The beauty of producing your own training videos is that you’re in control of how they come together. After filming or putting your animations together, you can edit the video files using video editing software.

While you don’t always need a video editor, especially for screen recordings, it can help polish the video up by adding branding, transitions, and editing out speaker pauses.

Some of the best video editing software tools on the market include:

• Adobe Premiere Pro
• Apple Final Cut Pro
• Apple iMovie
• Pinnacle Studio
• CyberLink PowerDirector 365
• One-take video creation
• Vimeo Create

Any of these tools will help get your video ready to train new employees in no time.

4. Host and distribute your training video to stakeholders

Once your video is filmed and edited to your liking, you’ll need a place to host it and share it with others in your organization.

If you need more privacy (say the training has sensitive company content) or easier ways to organize, find, and share your videos, Vimeo’s Video Library can help you out.

You can make sure your videos are only accessible by specific people or teams and use SSO.

For a free option, you may consider creating or publishing to a YouTube channel dedicated to employee training. Your training videos can be uploaded as YouTube videos, which are pretty easy to share. If you need them to be private, you can always keep the videos unlisted — just be aware that anyone with a link can watch them.

5. Follow up to ensure understanding

The final step in producing training videos is making sure the content does its job. When using videos to train new employees, it might not always be easy to gauge how well they’ve understood the content (unless you’ve included interactive quizzes).

However, one great feature of hosting videos on the Vimeo Video Library is that users who have access can comment on the videos they’re watching to ask questions at specific time codes.

Along similar lines, you can always ask your new employees to comment at the end of the videos or fill out a quick form to say they’ve watched and understood the content of the video. If you end up with lots of questions or feedback, it’s a good indication that you might need to go back over the content of the video and improve it.

Training video templates to try

If you’re still struggling with ideas on how to build an effective training video, you can always try out one of Vimeo’s corporate training video templates. These templates can help you hit the ground running and get a video set up in minutes. Here are a few you can take advantage of:

1. First Day:

The First Day template is a great option to help you give an overview of what an employee can expect on their first day and virtually tour the office.

2. First Six Months

Many new employees worry about expectations in their first few months. Help put their minds at ease with a friendly guide.

3. Workplace Safety

To cover the essentials, you can use the Workplace Safety Training template. You can use this to cover health and safety, food hygiene, fire safety, or any industry-specific safety standards.

Find more templates: Corporate training video templates

Creative training video examples

Before you go ahead and start creating awesome videos, let’s take a look at some examples of creative training videos to help fire up some inspiration.

CDS Agency Training Video

CDS Agency provides a neat and professional onboarding training video with a strong narrator explaining the expectations of its concierges.

Worksafe NZ

This training video covers health and safety in the construction industry. But despite the serious topic, they’ve managed to include humor and engaging graphics to hold your attention.

Greystone & Co

These types of videos help new employees get to know key people in the organization. They can help offer them motivation as well as inspiration from leadership. What’s more, they’re relatively easy to produce.

Training videos FAQ

Use video for your employee training

Video takes your organization’s training program out of the boring slideshow rut and into the modern business world. 

You don’t need a massive budget to create a range of engaging and effective training videos for your new employees. You can even start with an everyday smartphone or recording your screen and webcam using Vimeo Record.

If you’re short on time or you’d rather use a tried-and-tested format, check out the variety of corporate training templates available in Vimeo Create.

Learn how to boost team performance with video