Enhancing Corporate Training: Customized Staff Training Video Solution for Effective Learning

While Skillman Video Group is a full-service video marketing and production agency that can meet our clients’ end-to-end video marketing needs, we occasionally accept projects such as a staff training video, where we may not be involved all the way through “from concept to content,” but our client’s needs slightly exceed their own internal video editing capacity and capabilities.

Production Unbundled for a Staff Training Video

We have the flexibility to unbundle and broker a range of video production services: concept, including the discovery, creative brief, and scriptwriting; video production, in terms of planning and executing a shoot for interview footage and b-roll; graphics design and animation; and post-production treatments, including video editing, sound and color correction; sourcing stock content; and translation and captioning.

Capturing and/or editing a staff training video is just one example of two such services.

We help our current and prospective clients think through and price their options to best meet their business needs in such cases.

Video Maximizes Training Session Benefits: Now Everyone Can “Attend”!

A recent example is of a financial services organization that presented an internal training workshop for some newly onboarded staff.

While the training was offered live, there were a few individuals who couldn’t attend in person, on site, on the day, or at the time that the session was offered.

For that reason, our client arranged to record the session so it could be watched as a staff training video by their recruits at their convenience at a later date and time.

The Raw Footage and Video Editing Needs

Because the presentation would feature both live speakers with handheld microphones pacing at the front of the conference room along with their presentation slides displayed on a stationary big screen, the client chose to set up two cameras: one to follow the presenter and a second fixed in focus on the screen as a reference, so that it would be clear which slides were displayed at the same time as the presenter talked about the concepts that were being visually reinforced behind them.

For the full course of the roughly 90-minute session, the client needed their final consolidated staff training video of the workshop to cut between the speakers and the correct slides, displayed for the correct duration and in full-screen high-definition resolution.

This treatment—cutting between the staff training video footage and the stills of the slides taken from PowerPoint presentation file shared with us—was simple enough to do from an editing difficulty standpoint, but required attention to detail, watching and listening to the footage all the way through from start to finish, to cross-reference and match the right slides to the timecodes in minutes and seconds during which the speakers referenced them, then cutting them in.

The Video Style Points: Design & Animation

While no background music was needed for the final edited staff training video, SVG was also commissioned to design and animate the company’s intro and outro logo bumpers and lower thirds that identify the speakers the first time they appear in the video.

SVG’s graphics designer was able to advocate for a logo animation that used their landscape orientation rather than the portrait orientation recommended in their brand standards for letterhead and websites. His insights helped choose the best dynamic rather than static design characteristics to suit the medium of video, with its particular viewing aspects, color text and image layers, and added dimension of motion.

Once templates such as these are designed, these digital assets can be easily updated for any future reuses. For many of our clients with business-to-business marketing initiatives that range well beyond a single internal staff training video, this is a great return on investment and addition to their video brand standards.

The Video Version Review Process

An SVG editor concurrently assembled Version 1 of the staff training video, and the project manager shared it with our client, acknowledging the original delivery schedule assumptions, so that they could let us know of any updates.

While video production is our full-time occupation, we appreciate that, for our clients, it’s an additional initiative, on top of their full-time roles, to review and provide feedback on their video projects.

We are always glad to match our pace, so far as the workloads and deadlines will permit, so that our clients can devote the needed attention to reviewing and providing their feedback. In this case, it wasn’t so much the time and additional stakeholder input typically required for reflection on the creative direction, but rather adequate time in a busy week for them to skim through the sheer runtime of the full session to make sure that all of the right slides were in the right place within their staff training video.

They could watch it in an easy-to-use web-based video viewer where they could leave time-coded comments for any edits needed. We worked from an assumption at the outset that we might need at least one round of edits to get it completely right. Fortunately, no edits were needed; we had put all of the right slides in the right place on the first attempt.

However, we did need to add the subsequently approved graphics to their second cut, Version 2, for final review and acceptance of the staff training video to be delivered. With the graphics added and now confirmed to look good not just on their own but within the context of the video, we were ready to prepare the final delivery.

Supplemental Video Treatments: Closed Captioning

One feature that we typically include with each final video is closed captioning. This represents a separate file that can be interpreted by a video streaming application to show or hide on-screen text, timed to the spoken words.

For a typical two-to-three-minute marketing video, there’s only a marginal cost to order this from our third-party vendor, and we are able to provide it at no additional charge to our client.

In this case, the runtime of the staff training video was so long, normal captioning would have cost a not-insignificant percentage in addition to the total original project budget, not only in commissioning it from the vendor, but also for our post-production teammate time to copyedit these, to correct any misinterpreted words or stylistics.

The solution was found within the aforementioned video viewer platform that we use, which also creates a caption file type that is both editable and downloadable at no additional cost.

While it is auto-generated (AI) rather than by a human and provided in only one of the possible file format outputs (vtt), this solution proved satisfactory for our client’s purposes, providing them a means to review, edit, and employ the closed captioning feature for any of their viewers who may benefit from that option while watching the staff training video.

The Final Video Deliverables: An Asset for Timely Re-Use

The final staff training video and the caption file were posted to an online file-sharing folder for their download and use.

The project plan was updated to reflect the completion of all of the few but critical tasks, and we confirmed that everything was successfully delivered to their full satisfaction. We emphasized that we remained readily available to integrate any feedback that they may have on our process or to handle any future video production needs.

Coordinating the filming and post-production allowed them to capture, synthesize, and share the information in the form of a staff training video—beyond the single live delivery of the session—to those who couldn’t attend, those who might benefit from reviewing again later, and potentially still others, over and over again, as far into the future as the content remains relevant.

Time and Energy Saved

Equally importantly, outsourcing freed them up to focus their energies on their most important and pressing work—the best use of their time and talents—while SVG handled this staff training video task expediently on their behalf.

While it was a simple staff training video post-production project that didn’t call for creative input from SVG, we were pleased to leverage our expertise and efficiencies in video editing for them.

We encourage businesses with similar opportunities for strategic outsourcing of unbundled video production services to learn how we can customize our capabilities to their bespoke needs!