Better Engagement, Comprehension and Knowledge Retention: Why Training Video is the Must-have for your L&D Toolbox

Better Engagement, Comprehension and Knowledge Retention: Why Training Video is the Must–have for your L&D Toolbox

Executive Summary

Key trends in the modern workplace, post-Covid are placing great demands on Learning & Development, and adding effective training video to your training program is the key to overcoming them.

Global workplace trends

• Remote & hybrid work model
• The skills gap is greater than ever
• Continuous introduction of new rules and regulations

Demands on L&D

• Online learning must be accessible to every employee everywhere.
• New learning materials must be engaging to generate comprehension and retention.
• Large volumes of new learning content must be continually produced.

Training video is supremely placed to address these needs because:

• As a digital medium it is inherently designed for easy and long-reaching distribution.
• It far outperforms text and images for capturing and keeping the attention of learners.

And when training video is instructor-led, the learner is all the more engaged.

Yet, with all the benefits, it has been difficult for L&D to produce their own training videos cost-effectively and at scale. Moreover, recruiting employees from within the organization to be the face of talking-head training video can be very challenging.

In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at some of L&D’s toughest challenges today, how video can help them address these challenges, and how D-ID enables the production of talking-head learning and corporate training videos without all the time, cost, and effort that come with video production, benefiting employee development, and making for effective training programs.

Global trends impacting the workplace

Around the world, many people are  finally taking a deep sigh of relief and cautiously entering the (mostly) post-Covid era.

Yet, the impact of the pandemic will still be felt across so many different areas of our lives, for a long time to come.

The world of work is one such domain. Among the key new-normal trends that we are seeing in the global workplace are:

The extensive transition to a remote and hybrid work model

To illustrate, many Fortune 100 companies including Fujitsu, Cisco, and PwC have implemented a remote first policy. As for employees, they’re all in. According to recent research, 97% say that they want to continue to work remotely, at least some of the time.

A skills gap that has never been greater

In a survey by McKinsey, 87% of executives reported to be experiencing or are expecting to experience a skills gap in their workforce. And according to the World Economic Forum (WEF) half of all employees worldwide will need to be reskilled by 2025.

The continuous introduction of new rules and regulations

Many industries are profoundly challenged by the ongoing development of new rules and regulations that demand strict adherence to avoid regulatory fines or other non-compliance penalties.

The implication for L&D

What this new world of work means for the organization’s learning and development leaders, teams and training programs is that they now need to be able to:

• Create content that can be effectively and efficiently distributed to any employee anywhere, driving online training
• Accelerate the introduction of learning materials that are engaging enough to generate comprehension and retention,  to close the skills gap, remain competitive, and drive growth.
• Achieve scale in continuously producing large volumes of new learning content to align the workforce with the corporate training objectives

And, to complicate matters even more, all this needs to be done with superlative cost efficiency.

But doing all this isn’t easy:

Delivering learning content to any and every employee wherever they are in the world can be a logistics nightmare for training programs.

Assuring that this content is compelling and engaging, when people are working from home, finding themselves beset by a severe case of ‘Zoom fatigue,’ is likewise a tough hurdle to overcome.

Maintaining learner engagement is so challenging, in fact, that it’s been identified as the top area of improvement for e-learning.

And without engagement, comprehension and retention are surely out of reach, where the average employee will have forgotten 65% of the material covered in a learning session. 90% after six months.

Furthermore, creating learning content in innovative ways comes with a high price tag. Budgets these days are not increasing in direct proportion to the increase in need, especially as organizations brace for an economic downturn.

It’s time to evolve

So, on the one hand L&D understands that it has a key, strategic role in advancing the success of the business (and avoiding risk) both in the near and long term.

And on the other hand, it is also clear that achieving strategic goals and overcoming challenges, means that L&D needs to evolve. The same old same old just won’t do anymore. And this is reflected in the fact that

• 70% of L&D professionals say their blend of job training delivery methods will change.
• There is a 71% increase in demand for digital learning.
• 73% of learning leaders plan to develop more custom content.

So how can L&D overcome some of its toughest challenges and improve ever training program?

With video.

Video to the rescue

As a digital medium, video can be broadcast, distributed, and consumed anywhere, overcoming the remote consumption challenge.

It is also perfect for securing engagement. The visual and auditory nature of videos sparks millions of neurons that don’t light up with other types of learning content.

Moreover, human beings have an innate preference for video. We can see this in the fact that in 2020, 96% of consumers watched more video online than ever. As for learners, 92% report that video has a positive impact on their learning experience.

And as we have seen from our colleagues in Marketing, they have long leveraged the fact that 95% of a message is retained when watched in a video, as compared with 10% when reading the message as text.

We want video. And we want video not only when we’re scrolling through our social feeds or researching products to buy online. We want at work, and we want video to help us learn at work.

According to Forrester, 75% of employees agreed that they were more likely to watch a job training video than look through documents or scroll through emails and web articles.

In terms of comprehension and retention, the use of short video clips in training video allows for more efficient processing and memory recall in general, and specifically for L&D videos can make employee training more effective.

And there is evidence to prove it. Namely, the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, resulting in higher retention rates as compared with other learning media.

But not just any video will do

For a corporate learning video to be effective, a key element is the instructor. This is why instructor-led training video is among the most common type of corporate training video found in corporate training programs.

People respond to people. And this is where the talking head video comes into play. This is the kind of video where, true to its name, an instructor – our talking head – is on screen delivering the learning content.

Making talking head training videos a part of your training programs can boost interactive training, active learning, boost career development, soft skills, and other meet business goals. Creating videos is easy with D-ID.

When people want to learn more about a product or service, 96% of them seek out a talking head explainer video.

The benefits of talking head videos in corporate training programs are many. And especially in a remote and hybrid model, it helps employees to experience the human connection that they often feel they are missing.

And when the talking head is someone from within the organization, the learner gains an otherwise unavailable opportunity to become familiar with people in the company they might not get to meet.

What about scale and costs?

Yes, training video addresses the key challenges of remote distribution, and learner engagement, comprehension, and retention.

And instructor-led, talking head training videos can take this even further in e-learning and corporate training.

But how is it possible to scale and enable the production of large volumes of learning content in your corporate training program? And what about costs?

Training video production is not known for being a cost and time efficient endeavor. Rather, the path to create training videos is notorious for having a high price tag, often requiring a professional agency for scripting, production, crew, equipment and video editing software.

As for talking head videos, it isn’t always easy to find employees who are willing to ‘go on stage’ and be the face of your corporate training program.

There has to be another way

Imagine you could create the video we see below at the touch of a button, where all you’d need to do is upload an image, then audio or text, and click to transform the image into an engaging, compelling, effective learning or training video to build into your training programs.

D-ID’s creative AI technology takes images of faces and turns them into high-quality, photorealistic videos to use as training videos in your learning program.

You could create:

• As many engaging talking head training videos as you want.
• New corporate training courses and updated onboarding materials on-the-fly, whenever needed.
• Personalized, engaging, and compelling learning content for any required topic or domain, hard or soft skills.
• And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Well, the great news is that you don’t have to imagine.

How D-ID is helping L&D deliver value

D-ID is bringing a way to reduce the time, cost, and effort of producing, personalizing, and revising corporate learning and training video content, and specifically talking head corporate training video.

We empower employee training and development teams to create more videos than ever, that are more effective and engaging than ever, at the click of a button and at a mere fraction of the cost.

• Compliance training and other mandatory training
• Corporate training programs
• Employee development and development programs
• Online training and remote learning
• Sales team training and online learning
• On-boarding content for new employees

There is no need for video editing skills, video editing software, nor for hiring an expensive production crew with actors and tons of complex equipment.

With D-ID anyone can create and update talking head training video for their corporate training. Our offering is an AI-based solution that takes images of faces and turns them into high-quality, realistic videos. It turns a single photo of a person into as many videos as you need, without having to recruit an in-house volunteer to be filmed.

And with these highly personal videos you get increased levels of engagement, comprehension, learning session completion, and knowledge retention of almost any corporate training program.

Ultimately, with D-ID, L&D can meet its strategic objectives of:

• Distributing cutting-edge learning content to anyone, anywhere in a world of remote work and online training
• Bridging the growing skills gap with compelling and effective learning and training contents
• Achieving scale to produce as many new learning content as needed, on-the-fly for your training program
• Securing unprecedented cost efficiency

And this is how L&D can meet its strategic objectives and drive value for employees and the organization in the modern workplace.

To learn more about how you can create as many talking head videos for your corporate training content as you need, at the click of a button a fraction of the cost, with no video editing software, get started here.