Introduction
With so many businesses currently facing hiring and budget freezes, it’s never been more critical for your organization to have a strong L&D strategy in place. During times of economic uncertainty, some employees take on new or additional responsibilities, team structures undergo changes, and there is a heightened need for high–performance leadership teams. Now is the perfect time to focus on creating effective learning and development programs.
As you reassess your L&D strategy, you can discover new ways to empower and upskill your co-workers and align your teams. This is essential to retaining and keeping your employees engaged and aligned and building a resilient, recession-proof business. But how do you go about creating L&D programs that work while budgets are tight?
The good news is that if you’re looking to engage your employees on a deeper level, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. With the right content strategy, you can deliver an impactful and enriching learning experience by simply repurposing the L&D content you already have.
Increasing the Value of L&D
Let’s be honest - training manuals are not most people’s favorite way to learn. They’re static, unengaging, and don’t often lead to strong knowledge comprehension or retention. According to the Social Science Research Network, our brains decode visual information 60,000 times faster than written text. They’re wired for it!
In fact, according to a study by the eLearning Industry, video-based instruction can improve learning outcomes by as much as 50% compared to text-based methods. Kaltura also found that employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than to read a document. Ultimately, video-based training leads to a higher retention rate of 95%.
Now, this doesn’t mean your text-based training materials need to go to waste. Simply by turning these materials into visual and video content, employees can learn faster, retain more knowledge, and upskill and train better. The best part? Creating a strong L&D video strategy to future-proof your business is easy to roll out.
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Visual Learning
The Power of Visual Learning
As L&D professionals, we’ve all seen how employees react to a new training manual - as dry and boring. This makes it challenging to keep employees engaged and motivated to learn. And as static materials, it’s difficult to update them or adapt them to reflect changes in your industry or organization.
Plus, training manuals and PDFs lack interactivity, so it’s harder for employees to visualize concepts and retain information. Many full-time workers struggle to find time to read manuals.
The 3 critical problems with text-based learning materials:
01. They’re time-consuming
02. They’re dull
03. They’re not memorable
However, it’s easy to change this negative perception. How? Leverage your existing learning content to create bite-sized, engaging videos to increase knowledge retention and lead to meaningful behavioral change.
Video-based instruction not only makes employees more likely to want to watch a course - it can significantly improve retention and learning outcomes.
Video creates greater flexibility and accessibility in employee training. Employees can watch videos at their own pace and pause and replay them as needed, allowing them to focus on the material they need to understand and review it as often as needed. They can learn from anywhere by accessing videos from any device.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the biggest benefits of visual learning:
Retention
Traditional Video
Powerpoint or Manuals
Times
HOW CAN WE HELP?
Built for L&D teams, Powtoon makes learning videos easy to create, flexible to manage, and quick to distribute. In practice, your L&D team can deliver effective programs at scale. Globally, over 40 million people use Powtoon to turn complex and scattered information into powerful videos.
How to Plan a Successful Visual Learning Strategy
Before you dive into creating your L&D video content, you’ve got to map out your visual learning strategy. Below are some tips to make your L&D video content engaging and effective:
As a first step, take some time to define a course plan that outlines a clear timeline for the learning lifecycle of your training program. Then, create a step-by-step plan for how to achieve the desired outcome. This plan should include the following:
This plan should include the following:
By involving important decision-makers - such as your CEO, COO, or CFO - in the design of your training programs, you can align your courses more closely with your organization's goals and objectives.
Need some help setting your “Success Grade”? As a general rule, if the learner scores 70% or higher, they’ve retained the critical information from that course. Anything less than 60%, and you should probably clarify some of the information in your video or adjust your content roadmap.
Transforming your text-based materials into engaging L&D video content is simple and cost-effective. All you need to do is repurpose the training content you’ve got. It’ll only take a few hours!
So, don’t let those training manuals go to waste. Take the opportunity to sort through your existing L&D resources and think about how you want your employees to consume the content. Consider whether you can take information from multiple resources - such as PDFs and a training manual - and combine them into one engaging video course.
In the next section of this guide, you’ll find more expert tips and tricks for transforming your existing resources into engaging L&D videos.
If your company has lots of content or if you’re just starting to build your learning library, it’s essential to keep your video library organized. Your courses can comprise several documents, links, and videos. Make sure you have defined naming conventions based on the course subject and tagging by topic to make your library more accessible and searchable.
How to Transform Your L&D Materials into Engaging Video Content
Now that you’ve defined a clear visual learning strategy, here are our top tips for producing L&D content to keep learners motivated and engaged:
Let’s start simple. Nobody wants to watch a 54-minute video on workplace safety. Your learners will get bored the same way they do when they’re required to read a 67-page manual. So, break down your training videos into 4 minutes or less. Then, turn your new series of videos into a course or playlist for easy viewing at your learners’ convenience.
With Powtoon, we can easily create videos that tell a story and immerse employees in an experience or environment. The result is a very engaging video that works much better than a PDF document.” - Tibco
Converting training materials into videos doesn’t mean a mountain of new work for yourself. It’s a fantastic - and affordable - way to repurpose the content you already have.
Bring the training manual to life by turning the words into a voiceover with matching visuals. Watch this example to help you get started:
Motion is key to keeping your learners engaged. Videos that look like PowerPoints may get slightly more engagement. But they won’t catch your learners’ attention, nor save you any time producing them.
When creating a video with Powtoon, choose from a wide range of templates with pre-built animations - so you don’t even have to think about it!
HOW CAN WE HELP?
Powtoon’s PowerPoint integration allows you to easily upload an existing presentation and transform it into an engaging video. How does it work? Simply import your PPT file and watch as it converts to a video format. You can then customize your new video with royalty-free footage, images, animation, characters, voiceovers, and music.
When to Use Video in Your L&D Strategy
You can use video to transform your L&D content at virtually every stage of the employee’s learning experience.
Leverage Powtoon to Create:
Here are just a few examples of times when video can take your L&D resources to the next level:
It’s not easy to visualize what a company does - its history, mission, or values. But you can express all these through video to truly engage your employees. Remember, this isn’t just part of onboarding new joiners. All employees need these resources to stay aligned and clear on the company’s mission.
Using animated or infographic videos, you can successfully communicate the must-knows and good-to-knows with the look and feel of your brand. These videos set the tone for your learning culture, empowering employees to learn confidently.
“Powtoon has enabled us to quickly create and deliver content in a format that resonates with our mission to inspire and empower youth culture. Through short, engaging, visual storytelling, we can get training into the hands of our store teams in as little as 1-2 weeks, depending on the subject matter.” - Jennifer Baker, Senior Manager, Retail Learning & Development at Foot Locker
It can be overwhelming learning all the tech tools in your organization. You can confidently roll out new software to new joiners or across your organization with tutorial videos.
You can also enhance the demo video with onscreen text and animation to help show your team the ropes.
“Powtoon brings our staff training videos to another level. Our team benefits from Powtoon’s fun and interactive features that make training enjoyable and effective. As our workforce learns new programs and platforms to face the demand of the virtual world, we turn to Powtoon to train the team, helping staff stay relevant and thrive in our virtual communication initiatives.”- Luz Hinojosa, Education Project Manager at Texas Association of Countries
It’s natural for organizations to evolve as they scale and grow. But it’s challenging to introduce new changes and concepts with clunky presentations and email updates. Use video to showcase your organization’s change journey, new goals, and changes for greater transparency.
Take note of the questions after several employees have completed a training course or onboarding program. Those questions are a great jumping-off point for creating an FAQ video. This process helps avoid meetings or emails to save your team time.
Creating Engaging L&D Video Content: Expert Tips & Tricks
We’ve put together a list of expert tips and tricks to help you create exciting, engaging, and scalable L&D video content:
Case Study: Foot Locker - Video Learning at Scale
Foot Locker is a leader in the footwear industry whose purpose is to inspire and empower youth culture around the world. So it’s essential to train the company’s in-store personnel to reflect its values around diversity and inclusion.
Before they used Powtoon, creating learning content was labor-intensive and didn’t effectively communicate to global employees.
How did Foot Locker address the problem? They used Powtoon to level up from training by paper binders to training by visual learning experiences worldwide.
Powtoon’s library of characters and branding elements helps Foot Locker enhance their in-store experience. They have created a common visual language across videos, emails, presentations, and other training collateral. They’ve also elevated their L&D content by turning their learning materials and manuals into bite-sized video content with audio, voiceovers, and animated characters.
Foot Locker even uses characters to emulate its diverse employees and create a deeper sense of belonging. As a company celebrating youth culture:
“Footlocker focuses heavily on diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Training materials where everyone looks like a cookie-cutter wouldn't work for us. Powtoon’s visual learning platform enables us to create these dynamic characters that can be from all different geographies, body types, heights, and ethnicities, so everyone who takes this training feels connected to the video!” - Jennifer Baker, Senior Manager, Retail Learning & Development at Foot Locker
Today, their training videos help enhance their in-store experience and create a common visual language across all company learning materials. The results? Increased high-performing employees who align with the company’s values, meet customers’ expectations and perfectly represent the Foot Locker brand.
The Payoff: A Workplace of Engaged Learners
Video is an incredible tool to make learning engaging. So, what kind of results can you expect? With the right L&D content strategy, you’ll benefit from employees excited to grow and develop at your company, becoming more skilled and retaining essential information. As a result, you’ll experience a boost in employee engagement, retention, and productivity.
The key is to balance visual learning and community learning. Remember that videos are additional tools for L&D teams to boost knowledge retention and skill development - all while sticking to a tighter budget.
So, how can you get started? Powtoon is the visual engagement solution that gives L&D teams the flexibility to create, manage, and distribute videos and visual learning content in one place. Powtoon can help determine the best solutions to meet your L&D goals.
