At a recent conference of the Association for Talent Development, participants were polled on their biggest challenges for the coming year. In an age of maturing technologies to support a range of learning and development (L&D) programs, many of the conference attendees responded that they were looking to increase the effectiveness of training, the relevance to the business strategy, and to unlock the untapped potential of social learning.

While these challenges are substantial, we are excited about the opportunities they present. Video makes it easy for anyone, both professional trainers and rank-and-file employees, to create content that enables the rapid sharing of knowledge throughout a department or company.

Tackling Today’s Top 3 Corporate Learning Challenges With Video

1. Aligning learning outcomes to business goals

One of the top challenges identified by L&D professionals was the need to more closely match the goals of training with the goals of the business as a whole.

By interviewing the leadership team, L&D professionals can take the company’s strategic priorities and translate them into tactics for designing the curriculum. Instead of asking executives what employees should be learning, chief learning officers should quiz executives on the problems the business is trying to solve and the opportunities that are ripe for exploitation. When the L&D team understands the who, what, and when, along with the relative priority of the goal, they can better align their training initiatives to business priorities, developing curriculum and criteria for success.

One of the best ways to ensure that the company’s rank and file see the benefit of training initiatives — and take them seriously — is to have leadership voice their support for the program. Often this works best in the form of a short, casual video. By hearing the company’s leaders speak directly to them, employees are better able to “see the big picture” and understand how their performance directly contributes to the bottom line.

As a new training initiative progresses over weeks and months, the L&D team can highlight their colleagues’ performance as a whole in the form of a video. Publically reflecting on the progress of the organization as a whole is a great way to rejuvenate interest in the initiative, praise top performers, and report on the impact to business outcomes that initiative is intended to support.

2. Maximizing learning event effectiveness with training reinforcement

When so much effort and so many resources go into developing training material, trainers are finding it increasingly important to be able to ensure that their training events are as effective as possible.

Based on what researchers know about memory, and based in part on Will Thalheimer’s 2006 work, humans forget approximately 90% of what they learn within one month — unless they repeat it. Through a process known as interval reinforcement, learners who engage with content through small, spaced-out moments that remind them of what they have learned, retention can be increased between 78 and 94%.

This is great news for corporate trainers, but one that means that these moments of reinforcing content must be made available digitally, accessible on employee’s desks and smartphones.

Video is one of the best ways to produce training reinforcement content. Learners are already comfortable with using the web to view short-form video for information and entertainment. For trainers, videos are easier to create than ever before using nothing more than their desktop or laptop computer, a slide deck, a webcam, and desktop recording software. Gone are the days where creating video required a team of AV experts and substantial spend on their professional services.

If your training the event was live, capturing the presentation on video is another great way to generate content for training reinforcement. By editing the event into recaps of 2-5 minutes each, L&D professionals can simply repurpose the content in a way that is easily digestible and accessible on-demand.

Sometimes, forgoing a live training event altogether is the most efficient way to support training reinforcement. Instead of a single, keystone event — with all of the cost and coordination included — break up the lesson into short microlessons and distribute it over weeks or months. Skipping the long-form training event while stretching a concept out over several weeks will leave learners more refreshed and ready to engage with the training.

3. Empowering employees to teach and learn from one another

Social learning remains one of the most popular topics on the minds of learning and development professionals as the industry collectively attempts to find the best ways to tap this largely informal mode of knowledge transfer. From semi-informal events like employee brown bags and knowledge-transfer meetings to highly-informal solicitation of advice and sharing best practices, desktop video recording software and a so-called “corporate YouTube” make social learning at scale possible.

Related Reading: How To Scale Social Learning

 

With simple screen recording software and a webcam, or the built-in camera and native mobile application, employees can record video from anywhere. A 3D designer demonstrates a canonical model tree organization in a Catia assembly for a mechanical engineer. A legal assistant summarizes a precedent for a lawyer. A construction manager documents a potential workaround situation and sends to the architects for revision.

According to a recent report by Forrester, already one in three companies using an enterprise video platform are now allowing every employee to generate their own video content. This low barrier to entry makes it easy for anyone to share what they know. By uniting a library of social learning content in a single portal, L&D professionals can give their colleagues a consistent video learning portal and support a community around social learning.

Easy Video Creation & Secure Sharing With Panopto

Video makes creating training content easy for anyone, with the right tools. From recording and editing, to storing videos in a secure environment and sharing them with just the right people on any device, traditional learning management systems do little to support this increasingly popular medium. For Panopto customers, our end-to-end enterprise video platform makes it easy for anyone in the department and throughout the company the ability to author training content with ease.

To learn more about how Panopto can help your learning and development organization accomplish this year’s biggest goals, contact a member of our team today to request a free trial.