Learning is an on-going process in the modern workplace. Your employees are constantly engaged in some form of learning, whether it is from the internet, emails, peers, meetings, presentations, management feedback, or corporate social platforms. Gone are the days when long-drawn onboarding sessions, skill-training seminars, or workshops were the dominant learning medium in the organization.
Over the years, the corporate learning landscape has evolved vastly from a traditional instructional learning methodology to an employee-centric approach to digital learning. With an increasing emphasis on the user journey, the focus has shifted from ‘instruction’ to ‘experience’ that delivers learning most naturally by bringing learning to people in their digital learning flow, instead of a one-off instruction-based format.
While macro learning certainly has its place in certain learning scenarios, microlearning or bite-size learning is the new order of the day for employees who are increasingly learning on the go, when and where the need arises. Commonly known as just-in-time learning, this approach is pushing L&D departments to realign their efforts, learning mediums, and instructional designs to suit learning that is simple and effortlessly incorporated in the flow of everyday work to maximize its utility and adaptability for the learners.
The topic of changing corporate learning needs is an important one. In fact, a 2017 Deloitte Human Capital Trends research discovered that the altering corporate learning landscape is now the second most important topic on the minds of CEOs and HR leaders, with 83% of companies rating this issue as important and 54% rating it as urgent, up 11% from last year. Seeing this, the disruptions in the digital learning strategies require careful consideration of emerging tools and technologies that help organizations enable and advance the learning experience most suited for the modern employee and workplace.
YouTube has unequivocally become the standard against which all other video experiences are designed and measured, including corporate learning and development.
Over the last decade, YouTube revolutionized how people learn. Starting with the advent of Khan Academy in 2004, YouTube morphed video into a powerful learning medium for people across the globe. With 2.2 million YouTube subscribers, Khan Academy has alone delivered 440 million micro-lectures viewed by a global user base over 500 million times. Khan Academy’s success also prompted a new line of online video learning platforms such as Udemy, Coursera, Lynda, Udacity, Grovo, and various others boasting millions of subscribers.
However, the growing interest in YouTube-style learning experiences is not limited to education.
YouTube-style learning has also replaced classroom-style workshops or instructor-led training in the workplace. Your employees now expect video-based learning in an easily accessible enterprise video platform that is as simple to navigate as YouTube. With a user focus and a highly engaging learning experience, YouTube-like learning has changed the face of learning in the enterprise by granting employees a learning tool that they already like to use for everyday leisure learning and entertainment.
Speaking of entertainment, video streaming sites such Netflix, Amazon Video, and Hulu also replicated the YouTube ‘experience’ to provide users a familiar video platform interface based on YouTube’s widely successful model.
Similarly, enterprise video platforms use a familiar YouTube-like video-friendly interface, which offers the simplicity of navigating, searching, and sharing videos; ease of video playback and accessibility irrespective of the browser or the device; facilitation for content creation, upload and support for user-generated content; and a user-focus that makes learning more accessible and enjoyable.
Another revolutionary aspect of YouTube-based learning is how it encouraged authenticity and uniqueness over production values – shifting the focus from the professional quality of video production (which is costly and time-consuming) to the genuineness of user-generated content as well as the timeliness of information availability. This means organizations investing in video learning no longer need to spend extensive time and resources to create professional videos. Instead, they can enable more informal and creative content generation from employees or knowledge experts across the firm, which is speedier, more collaborative, and much less costly – all using an enterprise video platform used for various types of organizational learning.
The corporate L&D market has undergone wrenching changes over the last decade to help employees learn in line with ‘digital learning’ experiences. The corporate learning market, which is over $130 billion in size, has witnessed the evolution of learning needs that far surpass what traditional learning management systems have to offer – specifically the need to deliver a digitally enabled learning experience and micro learning that further enables a social, collaborative and interactive learning prized in the modern enterprise.
Amid these trends is the growing importance of video learning that has gained immense popularity within the L&D market.
Video has surged in popularity over the last decade. According to Cisco, video will comprise a whopping 80% of all internet traffic by 2019. Not only this, but video has also become an indispensable tool for a variety of use cases in just about any type of organization. In fact, Gartner predicts, by YE18, 75% of workers at large organizations will interact with various kinds of video more than three times daily.
The simple answer is that video makes training material easier for people to consume and remember.
According to employee engagement surveys conducted by Forrester, 75% of respondents were more likely to watch video lessons than read documents, emails, and web articles. In a visually stimulating medium, video engages learners in a way that other learning media cannot – reflecting video’s promising potential to engage learners in a medium they already prefer over others. This trend is even more true for millennials who are a ‘YouTube generation’ that already uses video for everything, from entertainment to educational learning and how-to videos, and naturally, expect the same for organizational learning.
Studies also show that due to high engagement levels, video can significantly improve knowledge retention and the ability for viewers to recall concepts and details, especially in the long run. Psychologists and authors Jennifer Rusted and Veronika Coltheart observed that presentations that include video along with text are 9 percent more effective than text alone when students are tested right away, but the retention surges to an astounding 83 percent when the tests are conducted over a period. Due to the value and stickiness of the learning acquired through video.
According to Forrester, a minute of a video is worth 1.8 million words. Even when taken figuratively, this stat is an effective representation of the power of video learning to deliver a lot more meaning, emotional impact, and knowledge than other mediums. A few minutes-long learning video can, therefore, consolidate and communicate a vast amount of information compared to written text, which is extremely handy for learning – especially just-in-time learning when people need to learn on the go to acquire knowledge for resolving problems or getting a job done.
Video is a highly efficient tool for documenting industrial knowledge from soon-to-retire employees, outgoing knowledge workers or subject matter experts (SMEs) in various parts of the organization. SMEs can record videos of their organizational or skill-based knowledge for training new hires or for general learning opportunities for employees or peers at large. Such learnings can make for high engaging knowledge transfer while preventing knowledge loss and minimizing corporate brain drain. With good searchability and proper management of such videos, this knowledge can be preserved for years to come.
Delivering L&D activities through video brings consistency and quality uniformity to all your learning material, especially ones that are taught with a level of standardization. With rapidly globalizing business presence across geographically dispersed teams and office locations, there is a growing need for L&D teams to establish learning experiences with some level of quality and consistency, regardless of where the training is delivered. Video effectively allows the standardization of all learning experiences and quality – vital for mission-critical training as well as for maintaining quality and consistency through all organizational learning experiences.
A great deal of organizational training and learning involves ‘show and tell’ execution of work-related scenarios, situations, or how-to tasks that are best delivered in a visually perceptive medium such as video. A role-play training video or a live field training video, for instance, is the best way to demonstrate ‘how to’ deliver and solve complex tasks – especially ones that simply you cannot convey with words alone. Not only this but acting out a scenario also improves knowledge retention for learning as it creates greater stickiness of information they can hear, read, and see being delivered.
Video serves to benefit L&D departments conserve execution costs associated with learning. Microsoft, for instance, used video to cut per person classroom training expenses from $320 to just $17, i.e., a $303 cost saving per person. Over a period of 3 years, Microsoft’s video platform for employee training and knowledge sharing resulted in cost savings of about $13.9 million per year, with a 569% ROI. Not only this, video brings about time efficiencies by saving time that would otherwise be spent in classroom-learning sessions or instructor-led training. For instance, Ernst & Young reduced its training time by about 52% after adopting eLearning across the organization.
Video has immense potential for learning. However, organizational learning cannot be delivered through YouTube for the simple reason that YouTube does not offer a basic set of enterprise application features and capabilities required by every organization, let alone specialized video features needed to meet growing enterprise video use cases across industries.
Some of these features and functionalities include enterprise-grade security and compliance; interoperability and deep integrations with line of business applications, flexibility to customize the platform to unique business requirements; branded platform and portals; automatic transcriptions, closed captioning and translation with all videos; powerful search capabilities for in-video search; content and user segregation between departments or various organizational units; detailed analytics – and the list goes on.
Additionally, having been ranked as one of the top seven distraction websites for employees (due to the amplitude of unrelated contents, promotional ads, etc.), YouTube can take your employee’s focus away from learning, not the other way around. For this reason, your organization needs an enterprise video platform like VIDIZMO that offers all enterprise video capabilities in one consolidated solution designed to meet all organizational learning needs.
For more on why YouTube does not suffice enterprise needs, read our blog When To Use Corporate YouTube vs. YouTube.
YouTube is one type of a video platform, and there are several distinct types of video platforms. Learn more in our detailed guide on video platforms.
To know more about how VIDIZMO can fulfill your company’s comprehensive video learning needs, read our whitepaper ‘A detailed guide to video for organizational learning & development in 2018’ or contact us today for more information.