In 2021, Amazon and Gallup surveyed over 15,000 U.S. adults in the workforce. They found that employees from companies with upskilling training were happier, stayed longer, and saw more promotion opportunities. Businesses offering this training avoided the cost of replacing an employee, which can be up to two times the employee’s annual salary. BenchPrep is an LMS that hosts courses to help you upskill your employees. Adding video to these courses will help you include visuals that make lessons clearer and more engaging. The following nine-step guide teaches you how to use video in BenchPrep for your employee training needs so they can level up and stick around.
1. Interview your employees
You can’t guarantee you’re creating a course on the most important skill for employees unless you ask them what they wish to learn. Interviewing them gives you the space to uncover this information.
Start with questions about your employee’s workday to get a sense of the skills they use at work. Listen closely to their challenges and ask follow-up questions to ensure you fully understand everything. After employees tell you their problems, ask them what would make the situation get better—the answer is the skill you need to teach them.
2. Write a script
Write a script for your upskill training—it sets your training’s tone, tells your speaker what to say, and prepares your animators. You can produce a professional one without script writing experience by following five steps.
First, make a plan for your video. Think about what you want the video to accomplish and set a goal. Then, brainstorm ideas about what you want your video to look like. What characters and scenes do you need to add to make your point and achieve your goal? You don’t need all the answers right now as long as you have a rough idea of what you want.
Second, learn more about the video’s topic. Learning others’ opinions about the subject helps you build an in-depth upskilling program. You will also discover ways to phrase and present your message to make your arguments more relatable and easier to grasp.
Third, arrange events in a sequence. The transition from one scene to another should be smooth and unambiguous, so employees keep track of your lessons. Think of scenes in terms of goals and moments:
What is the purpose of this scene?
What are the beginning, middle, and end of this scene?
Answering the first question ensures every scene increases workers’ knowledge. Meanwhile, the second one makes it easier to come up with transitions. Instead of thinking about how to go from scene A to scene B, you only have to consider how to go from scene A’s ending to scene B’s beginning.
Fourth, organize your findings into a script format. Take a piece of paper and create two columns, one labeled “Audio” and the other “Video.” In the Audio column, write what the speaker will say. Make sure the tone matches your brand. For example; include jokes if your company is known for its good humor. This small addition will make videos more enjoyable and recognizable.
Finally, write what will happen visually during each scene in the “Video” column. Add that wonderful chart you found during the research stage or a text box showing the anecdote you brainstormed. With these notes, you can determine if the visuals you plan to add support the story you want to tell.
3. Create a storyboard
It’s nearly impossible to animate a video everyone is happy with if no one knows how it will look. You should arrange your upskilling video using a storyboard and check if the story is cohesive with your goal or if you need to clarify certain areas.
Storyboards allow you to spot problems before they arise. You can identify redundant, confusing, or boring sections from sketches you drew in just a few minutes. Once you correct these mistakes, you can show your sketches to stakeholders and get their buy-in. Winning their support before animating reduces the chances of having to re-do scenes.
You can plan out how your video will look using our storyboarding format. It’s free and printable, so you can use it right away.
Draw the first scene on the left square. This is often the video introduction where you explain the video’s goal, what’s at stake if the viewer doesn’t understand its content, and what they will learn. So, think about the visuals that could help you convey these points. For example; you can use an arrow to show what the employee knows and what they will learn: point A to point B.
Finally, add the script lines you wrote to the Dialogue area beneath each box. Check to make sure your dialogue matches the scene you sketched as you imagined it in your head. If it doesn’t, think of a visual that could clarify what is happening.
4. Animate your upskilling training
Animation is a helpful tool for explaining concepts that are difficult to convey through live footage. This video style makes explaining complex topics easy. You can make everything appear exactly as you imagined it, without the constraints (and added costs) of actors.
The first step to recreating your storyboard is designing your character. You can easily do that in Vyond’s Character Panel. Create a free Vyond account and start a new video project on the right side of the home screen. Go to the Character Panel on the interface’s left side and click the Create New Character button. You can play with the character’s body type and features to make it look exactly how you want. If you are unsure what it should look like, model it after a person in your company to make training relatable.
Once you have your characters, you need to make them move. Use the Actions feature to help your character do things like wave, point, or walk. The Actions menu appears on the right side of the screen when you select a character. Selecting a character will also reveal the Motion Path menu, which lets you move characters from point A to point B. You can determine the pattern in which the speaker will move and the time it will take to do it.
Repeat the same process with any prop you wish to animate. Pick it from the Prop menu on the left, select it, and make it move.
5. Record high-quality audio
A course people can’t hear is worthless—if they can’t hear the lesson, they can’t learn the skill. The right equipment can produce high-quality audio, even outside a recording studio.
You’ll first need an XLR microphone, which comes with an XLR cable. Unlike USB microphones, XLR ones don’t receive enough energy from your computer to work. So, you need to plug the microphone into an audio interface, a device that powers it and passes its audio to your computer. The more energy involved allows the microphone to record clearer sound than USB ones.
Next, find the right room to record. It can’t be too small like a laundry room or as spacious as an events room because the microphone will pick up distortions and echo. Look for a medium-sized office that isn’t being used to set up your recording equipment.
A room of the right size can still produce an echo if it’s empty or has a lot of windows. Fill your recording office with furniture (or keep existing furniture in the room) to prevent this. Furniture helps absorb sound and stops echoes from bouncing around. You also want to find a room without any windows, as the glass will reflect the sound just like an empty room will.
Set up your equipment and launch your Vyond video project. Then, access the Mic Recording interface by pressing the Audio icon on the left side of the screen. Press record, then begin to read your lines from the script. Speak slowly and clearly, just as if you were giving an in-person presentation. And remember, it’s okay to make mistakes. Simply stop recording and start over. Alternatively, you can record everything in one take and cut out the parts you don’t like.
6. Upload your video to BenchPrep
You can use BenchPrep’s import tool to upload a single lesson or an entire course module into the platform. The software converts files such that any device can play them, so employees can watch them anytime.
Log into BenchPrep, which will bring you to its content management system called BluePrint. Visit the Other Tools section on the left sidebar and select Import Content:
- If you are uploading a single video, add it as an mp4 file.
- If you are uploading many videos, add them as a zip file.
7. Design a captivating thumbnail
A book cover is one of the parts most capable of making someone buy a book. The same happens with videos and thumbnails. Just like dull colors and an unattractive cover affect book sales, these traits can make employees ignore your upskilling training.
According to Netflix, people are more likely to click thumbnails conveying a precise sense of the tone and feel of the video. They do this by using an image or layout that elicits a complex emotion, not a gentle one. Think of complex emotions as the more powerful versions of gentle ones: a person slightly opening their mouth in surprise will convey a gentler emotion than someone shocked. So, if you want your thumbnail to motivate people, add someone jumping mid-air with a broad smile, not a person with a serious face.
The second component of a winning thumbnail is its colors. Choose colors on the opposite side of the color wheel from each other, like blue and orange. This will help them contrast, allowing your course thumbnail to stand out from anything else on the web page.
You can create a thumbnail that follows these tips using Canva. A vast library of emotional images is available in its free plan. Also, it has dozens of thumbnail templates to inspire your work. Decide on a layout, and then use Color Hunt to find a contrasting color palette.
8. Test your viewers’ understanding
BenchPrep’s most unique feature is helping you create tests that follow the exact parameters of a credentialing exam. Employees who know how exams work are more likely to pass them. They will know what questions and topics to expect and the time they will have to answer everything.
Replicating a credentialing exam’s format and topics is valuable even if employees are not certifying their skills. By creating a course that mimics a reputable exam’s content, you can be confident in teaching them skills your entire industry believes to be valuable.
To build your tests, go to BluePrint, and click the Tests menu on the left. You can pick between two types of tests.
A Full-Length Test has many sections, each with its own time limits. You can write a custom introduction, write each section’s questions, and add testing tools such as calculators. These tests are ideal for recreating the experience employees will face during a credentialing exam or making the testing experience more challenging.
Alternatively, you can use Standard Tests. They are untimed and show all questions from the get-go. These are perfect for quickly checking if your team understood a video or subtopic.
At any point, you might decide to add a unique question. When doing it, follow the question structure credentialing exams follow. Many experts often revise these questions, so these tests encourage specific answers, not vague “yes” and “no” ones.
9. Analyze what could improve
You should analyze how well your upskilling training program is doing so you know if you need to add more helpful content or reanimate it. BenchPrep’s analytics suite uncovers these opportunities to improve your course.
Click on the Group section in the homepage’s Analytics tab. You will see how far your employees have advanced into the course and the average test scores for those who have finished. Are 90% of people passing the test? Good, this shows your training is teaching most employees what they need for their certification exams. But if the test score is only 50%, it’s time to check if your videos are beneficial.
Scroll down to find the Strengths and Weaknesses section. You will find out how much employees know about different subtopics. For example; a course on email marketing might cover subtopics like copywriting, subject lines, and follow-up. Employees might be proficient in subject lines but only have a basic understanding of copywriting, even after the course. In that case, create new modules or reanimate existing ones to better teach copywriting.
Use Vyond With BenchPrep for Your Employee Training
You can explain the concepts, examples, and charts employees need to level up in their careers using Vyond. Our platform lets you arrange videos in an engaging sequence that makes workers proficient in any topic you wish to teach them.
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