Are Recorded Trainings Doomed To Be Terrible?
Recorded trainings suck. There. I said it.
I know it. You know it. The learners know it.
Now, I’m not talking about that occasional recording for the sake of posterity. Oh no no no.
I mean that honest-to-goodness “this is the training” recording. The one that always start with the best of intentions…
Sure, I could host the perfect one-time webinar.
But if I post the recording – boom. Now it’s the perfect 100-time webinar.
Too many training requests? Let’s have Johnny-the-SME do a quick overview and post that for now. We’ll come back to it later when we have more time.
Be honest with me. Later never came, did it?
(No judgement, my friend. I know how it goes.)
So, let’s fix it! How can we squeeze more any value out of the recorded training without taking up a bunch more time?
Summarizing the Challenge
Rather than list every reason recorded trainings are less than stellar, I think I can summarize it with two broad observations:
A recorded training is always going to be less engaging to a viewer than the original training was to an attendee.
A recorded training is a video and needs video design methods; whereas, the original training is often facilitated.
Basically, we need to up engagement however we can, and use some good video design principles when producing the recording (thankfully, that’ll go hand-in-hand).
BUT we can’t take a bunch of time to do it. Otherwise, we would just give this training a proper modality.
Garbage In = Garbage Out
I love how often that phrase works in life.
If the original webinar isn’t great, the recording doesn’t have a shot at even being good. It bears mentioning because I’ve discovered that there is just no floor to the amount of effort we can put into these. If we want people to get something out of them though, we need a few fundamentals.
Clearly Defined Sections
Recorded sessions are video, and video has the best engagement results when the shots are tight and focused.
Keep the session to three well-defined concepts and avoid tangents as much as possible. We also want to avoid significant amounts of group discussion – it’s just too much of a pain to follow along. Recordings that are vaguely organized and jump topics get muted.
It’s tempting to hand the reigns over to a SME and say, “go get’em, kid.” If my experience is any indication, this has a ~95% chance of imploding.
If you can provide SMEs with even just a template or 30-minute planning session, it will go a long way.
Relevance / Call to Action
We want learners to feel that the training is important in the beginning and that they are empowered to do something with the content at the end. Ideally, we’ve included a way to practice (see our other post on the importance of practice).
And with that comes an unpopular opinion…
Recordings are especially bad for Overviews and 101s. These topics are already an uphill battle for engagement, so why handicap them with a subpar modality? It’s basically signaling to the learner, “Hey, no big deal if you skip around through this, you’ll pick it up on the job anyway.”
Cut the Video
Most recorded trainings I’ve seen tend to run anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours.
Which has always felt bizarre to me since every human I’ve met makes it a point to tell me, “I feel like people zone out if videos are longer than 5 minutes.” But I digress…
If we outlined the sections beforehand – great! Now all we have to do is cut at those milestones to take a potential behemoth recording down to relatively reasonable video lengths. No effects or anything, just cut it and ship it.
Bonus tip: If you’re present for the recording session, jot down the timestamps on the recording so you can quickly find them later.
The Guided Worksheet
The last support for this modality is a guided viewing worksheet.
Essentially, we’ll just take the key points of the session and create a series of study questions to help the viewer follow along. It would be even better if we categorized by section so it signals to the learner when it’s ok to skip ahead or end the video (because who has time for cutting out all the filler?).
A learner’s attention isn’t infinite, so I like this method to let them know when it’s needed and when it’s not. The bonus is that it injects a little bit of accountability since the learner will have to submit this to someone for completion. (Now, whether you actually grade it is up to you)
The double bonus is that you now have all the key points outlined onto an easy-to-use and easy-to-access document. So if you, say…decide a recording isn’t even worth the cloud space it occupies, well you’re 90% of the way to a job aid, my friend!
Wrapping Up
Unfortunately, recorded trainings are here to stay. They’re an all-too-convenient lifeline for the L&D team that’s pushed beyond its bandwidth.
That still doesn’t mean we should subject learners to the raw, uncut footage.
Admittedly, including ALL the suggestions here might be too much of a time commitment, but the more we use, the better chance our training has for surviving the transition to recording…and that someone actually watches the thing.
Of course, if you have a recording that could use some attention, or if you’re ready to overhaul it into another design entirely, I can help you with that.