Want to see just how quickly a business can become an afterthought? Try operating at just 90% for a while.

A generation after the introduction of lean principles and productivity measurement, the fastest path to obsolescence is simply allowing your team to slightly underperform.

Whatever strategic advantage your business has, you rely on your people 100% to develop it, protect it, execute it, and profit from it. Having a team that truly understands your business, is fully prepared for their roles, and is ready and capable to get their best work done is essential to competing in today’s market — no matter what market you’re in.

The incredible importance of having a skilled, knowledgeable, capable team might just be what’s behind the latest trend in corporate investment.

According to the Bersin 2014 Corporate Learning Factbook from Deloitte, spending on corporate training grew 15% in 2013, continuing the accelerating pace of this 4-year trend.

Driving this trend, it seems, are increasing concerns on how well organizations’ workforces are prepared to handle the challenges of the future. Bersin notes leadership training is the #1 area for spending on training, and that fully 70% of companies report “capability gaps” in the skills they have versus those they expect to need.

The Challenge is to Scale Training Intelligently

In an era where training teams are challenged to remain small while organizations expand around the globe, the solutions to those capability gaps must rely on more flexible, sharable, reusable training.

While such training will no doubt take a variety of forms, Bersin argues that technology will be central to scaling corporate learning and development efforts. As the report notes, classroom education now accounts for less than half the total ‘hours’ people consume in training around the world, but that there is “significant growth in new virtual learning environments,” enabling companies to test “extending their training budget to reach 2-3 times the audience.”

All around the world organizations are investing in technology to help training departments better enable staff to be more productive, efficient, and innovative. Learning Management Systems, internal social networks, and video platforms have become invaluable aids to helping make training material easier and more engaging to consume.

At Panopto, we believe video, in particular, offers amazing potential as a means to scale corporate training activities. A video library can help you give your organization anytime access to job-specific training, leveraging the power of video to provide learning materials that are more compelling than a handbook, and more cost-effective than on-location events and seminars.

A centralized video library enables you to scale your training efforts by extending the reach of your existing training resources, allowing your staff to simply review existing recordings rather than requesting new class sessions. Further, a modern, searchable video library can allow your team to find the right know-how, right when they need it — even if they didn’t know it already existed.

With Panopto’s easy-to-use video platform, your training team can quickly and professionally record, webcast, edit, share, and track the performance and completion of all of your training videos, from internal process and program overviews to ongoing professional development courses — all from any laptop, and even if they don’t have any previous video expertise.

Video is a smart way to invest in scaling your training — and to help your people work at their best. Want to see how video can help your training efforts? Try Panopto free.