Video-based Learning is an Effective Option for Employee Training

If you have a tight budget combined with serious gaps in the learning skills of your employees, you may not have to invest a size-able budget in creating your own materials.

More and more human resources managers are turning to video-based learning from sources such as YouTube to close the gap.

There are valid reasons to consider this. This is a wealth of material from highly reputable sources, and it’s free and accessible to your employees from their laptops as well as their tablets and smartphones.

Video works well to impart knowledge to a wide variety of different types of employees, since it engages more senses as part of the process of learning.

On top of that, in watching videos, employees often see familiar things working or see people they can recognize or identify with, and that further triggers memory retention.

Sometimes a great video can even lay the groundwork for building a learning culture. A great example of that is Josh Kaufman’s video “The first 20 hours – how to learn anything.”

Kaufman, author of the international bestseller “The Personal MBA: Master of the Art of Business,” created this video about learning as part of his newest book, “The First 20 Hours: Mastering the Toughest Park of Learning Anything.”

It’s a TED talk, a non-profit global initiative devoted to spreading ideas. Their vehicle is generally short, powerful video-taped talks (18 minutes or less).

TED’s name came from the fact that is began at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in 1984. Today the TED talks cover virtually every topics ranging from business to science to global affairs and the videos are in more than 100 languages.

You can watch a large variety of highly informative TED talks on YouTube.

YouTube videos also can help employees gain insight into a large variety of both hard and soft skills. They are also a leading source of leadership development programs.

One good example is Brendon Burchard’s “What Great Leaders Actually Do.”

Burchard, a New York Times bestselling author, and motivation and marketing trainer, has other YouTube videos as well as courses through his own High Performance Academy at www.Brendon.com. He has good training videos as well on developing public speaking skills.

Video training, which is expected to grow rapidly in popularity in 2017, got a great push as a training vehicle when Sal Khan, a hedge fund analyst, began posting tutorials in basic math on YouTube in 2004. In his talk, “Let Us Video to Reinvent Education” he illustrated the power of interactive exercises and called for teachers to “flip the switch.” By that he meant they should give students video lectures to watch at home and do their homework in the classroom where the teacher was there to help them.

12 years later Khan had expanded his offerings to include tutorials on other aspects of math, economics, art history, computer science and health and medicine. He had more than 42 million registered users to his site from 190 countries. He had created the Khan Academy where he offered viewers a structured series of educational videos offering a complete curricula in a variety of subjects.

As these examples show, there is much to be learned from videos on sites like YouTube. If you have big training needs and a small budget, it is well worth exploring.

For more information on video training, contact SkyPrep today!