Industrial Training International
How Video Training Solves Specialized Workforce Skill Gaps
Achievements
Onboarding with On-Demand Video
100 Hours of Global Lectures Captured
Upskill Training Online
The Challenge
For more than 25 years, companies large and small have entrusted their training needs to Industrial Training International (ITI), placing a high value on the company’s high-touch, hands-on teaching methods provided at training centers in the United States, Canada, and Brazil.
In 2013, Industrial Training International recognized its clients would soon be facing a significant change in their workforce. With the impending retirement of the Baby Boomer generation already underway, the veteran rigging engineers employed by ITI’s customers were beginning to retire in large numbers. Schools, however, were not producing new graduates with the skills required to replace those positions.
With a team of experienced subject matter experts ready to teach and certified training centers ready to provide students with first-hand experience in the field, ITI had the know-how to produce the specialized skills its customers needed.
Classroom-based training, however, could only scale so far. With more and more clients requesting training — and with even more potential clients interested in training but unable to commit due to issues with scheduling or the cost of traveling to the training centers — ITI realized it needed an innovative solution that could allow its team to produce a course that could be delivered online but still retain the quality of the in-person sessions.
The Solution
ITI discovered Panopto — a flexible, software-based video platform with which it could record and curate video content from instructors scattered around the globe, manage and edit those recordings in the cloud, and easily share them with students anytime and anywhere, on-demand on their laptops, tablets, or smartphones.
The ITI training team started its Panopto experience with a pilot program focused on employee onboarding. First, the team recorded a series of standard employee onboarding presentations that the learning and development team would typically have delivered one-to-one with each new hire. Then, they paired up each video with slides based on the company’s existing onboarding handbook. A small library of recordings was created for new hires to review as part of a comprehensive onboarding program — with one video each week of the new person’s first month in their role.
Video made the scaling of learning and development presentations possible, allowing the team to ensure every new hire received consistent training — no matter when they were hired or what office they worked in. Video also helped boost audience engagement — hearing and seeing an actual member of the ITI team provided a human touch that wasn’t possible with the text-based handbook alone.
“We officially started recording lectures in October 2014,” says Christina Lanham, Manager of E-Learning and Digital Services. In just a few months, we captured nearly 100 hours of lectures from all over the world—down in Brazil, up in Canada, and all over the U.S. And since everything happens inside Panopto, managing the whole process from start to finish is simple.”
Thrilled with Panopto’s power and ease of use for recording and content management, ITI is also converting its old eLearning modules to Panopto videos.
“Video has really helped us deliver information our workforce needs in a way that works for them. And with the versaility of Panopto, the sky’s the limit for how we can offer video-based training in the future, both for our clients and ourselves.”
Christina Lanham, Manager of E-Learning and Digital Services, ITI
The Impact
With the success of eLearning in delivering the specialized engineering skills training on which the company has built its reputation — as well as its own positive experience in leveraging video for internal employee training and onboarding — ITI has begun looking at new ways to expand its service offerings and bring video training options to partners in industry, tapping into new opportunities in fields like sales. By using Panopto for product training demonstrations, ITI can enable its industry partners to train their sales forces in a much more scalable way, reducing travel costs and simplifying the logistics and resources required to reach every member of clients’ often geographically dispersed field sales teams.
After more than 25 years of leadership in the crane and rigging training field, Industrial Training International has created a much-needed innovation to fill a widening hole in the workforce. By empowering its experts worldwide with a simple and flexible video content management system, ITI has made delivering complex, specialized technical training anytime, anywhere, on-demand — a practical reality for its clients worldwide.
