Corporate Video Training Past and Present

While the current economic downtu
has meant that many companies have had to trim costs in certain areas of their business, the individual and collective knowledge of their employees still requires regular investment. Without ongoing training and constant product knowledge updates for employees, a company cannot hope to remain competitive in the marketplace. However, the need to curtail spending and maximize effective use of resources has inevitably led many companies to rethink their corporate training strategy.

In the early days of globalization many companies deployed teams of ‘in-house’ trainers to deliver training to their employees. These teams of ‘in-house’ trainers would travel between the company’s offices and production sites to deliver onsite training and to bring employees up to date with any new product releases. It was an essential but expensive strategy costing companies many thousands of pounds in employee downtime and traveling expenses.

As globalization gathered pace and the cost of maintaining ‘in-house’ training teams began to rise, many corporations began to outsource their employee training needs to specialized companies in order to cut costs. Invariably, training costs were trimmed at the expense of control over how instruction was managed and delivered. Moreover, the new training environment became sterile and lacked the personality of a corporate identity.

In an effort to maintain some semblance of corporate identity, companies began to integrate training videos into their employee instructional mix. Although seen as an effective method of delivering information uniformly across the various departments that make up a company, training videos were expensive to produce and still required employees to be gathered in one central point to view them. However, over the last ten years technological advances in video production and video delivery platforms has changed all this.

Corporate training videos can now be delivered across a range of delivery platforms including the Internet, webinars, seminars and conferences, thus making them accessible to the most remote of company employees. Furthermore, the cost of producing a corporate training video has dropped markedly to the extent that they are the most cost efficient training tool available to a company today.

Thanks to the impact of video technology on the corporate training environment, companies can now reduce their training budgets considerably. In addition, employee downtime is effectively eliminated as they are no longer required to travel to a central location for training sessions.

From a business efficiency perspective, the speed at which video training can now be delivered means that information and product updates can be distributed uniformly to every employee within the company with few, if any, time gaps. This in turn has made knowledge continuity within the corporate structure that much easier to manage.

The downside to corporate video training rests in its lack of interactivity. In short, it is difficult for employees to give their feedback or question the material contained in a given training video, unless the company provides a channel or trainer for this specific purpose.

Furthermore, how much an employee’s knowledge has increased as a result of watching a training video is difficult to measure. That is why corporate training video should always be delivered as part of a blended training package. Blended training packages make use of traditional quality assessment methods, such as feedback forms and questionnaires, to measure the effectiveness of a given program.

Corporate training video certainly presents a company with an exciting and cost effective means of disseminating information and for managing that all important employee knowledge base. It has also presented companies with the opportunity to regain control over how and when training should be delivered, effectively bringing the concept of corporate training full circle and back ‘in house’. But, as with all training methods, it is essential that video be seen as part of an integrated instructional strategy rather than be served up as an all encompassing training tool.