How Videos Enhance the Effectiveness of LXPs

Businesses spend a lot on training and developing new and existing employees, as made evident by the fact that organizations in the US spent $86.7 billion on employee education in 2018 alone.

Yesteryear organizations made use of Learning Management Systems (LMS’s) to bolster employee training and development strategies.
However, training requirements have changed drastically over the past few years, compelling new corporate training approaches such as adaptive learning, life-long-learning, and engagement learning.

Technological advancements have kept up with these changing requirements of the training and development landscape; equipping trainers and executives with new tools and platforms to provide personalized learning – such as Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs).

Enter: Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs)

Put simply, LXPs are modern descendants of LMSs that incorporate several unique elements to enhance the learning experience, and allow for an interactive and engaging learning environment.

Such efficacy has allowed Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs) to transform the training and learning landscape considerably.

This is evident in the fast-paced growth of the LXP market.
Josh Bersin, one of the leading figures in enterprise learning, says that the market for LXPs has grown to over $350 million in size.

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A customized experience for every employee

LXPs are interactive, fun, and also geared towards learning and development of new and current employees. They function like a learning portal that organizes and aggregates training related content. You have different types of material to choose from, including small videos, podcasts, animations, corporate presentations, long-form articles, and e-books.

Integrated AI recommends popular content in the community when employees first log on. After employees have consumed some of that content, the AI recommends more courses, videos, articles, and podcasts based on the skillsets explored earlier.

This creates a customized channel of content for each employee that helps them gain skills necessary for performing better in the workplace.

Importance of videos in LXPs

LXPs have all the content you need for training your workforce or simply helping them get to know your organization better.

But some forms of content are more effective than others.

Here’s why video content in LXPs makes for more effective training:

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Engaging your employees

Visuals are more captivating than plain text. Watching videos requires less effort on the employees’ part. Imagine a new employee reading a 10-page company handbook, versus them watching a video that details all the points covered in the guide.

Which one’s preferable?

Videos have entertainment as well as informational value, not to mention people enjoy video content. In fact, Forrester research finds that 75% of people are more likely to watch videos than read documents and articles online. This says a lot about the engagement capabilities of videos for your training.

If you want employees to engage with training material on your LXPs, opt for videos. As long as you make the videos enjoyable, employees will focus on the video and its content until the end.

 

Information retention is better with videos

Engaging employees is one thing, but helping them retain valuable information from the videos is something completely different. The budget that you allocate towards LXPs for training and developing your employees should not be wasted.

A Savo Group research found that just a week after a standard training session, an average employee will forget 65% of what was covered in the training material. After six months, they only remember 10% of what they had learned.

With videos, you can associate different visuals with information that you want employees to retain. Studies show that videos have a proven ability to increase retention of concepts in both the short and long term.

So whether it’s a corporate presentation or a single training session, incorporating videos in training can help employees remember core concepts that are vital for improved performance at the workplace.

Interactivity boosts effectiveness

When you make your training and development videos interactive, you can customize them for different levels of your organization. Management employees have different training and development needs, and the videos they see should address these needs – the same goes for employees from other departments and those who are new to the organization.

This is done by breaking the video down into different segments to remove any confusion that people from different levels of the organization may otherwise experience.

You can create a video to replace training meetings that leech company time, but they’re essential for employee performance, too.

The one-time video production cost and time may seem like a lot. But they will eventually save the company hours of precious management time. When you have training meeting videos uploaded on your LXP, onboarding employees will get access to them when they need them most.

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Make dry topics fun and simple

There are some aspects of training and development that may not be adequately conveyed through text or images. These range from complicated processes and concepts that may baffle new employees.

With an explainer video, you can use animations and visuals to help new people understand difficult concepts that they are essential for their job roles. You can take things step-by-step so that it’s easier for people to understand complicated processes and remember them.

Take this example of a MuleSoft video explaining Application Programming Interfaces. They took a reasonably difficult concept and used visuals to help people understand what APIs are and how they work.

While this is not directly related to employee training and development, it’s certainly an inspiration for videos that you can come up with for your company’s employees, to explain difficult concepts to them.

Democratizing video creation

Conventional LMSs typically entail a unilateral approach regarding video creation. L&D personnel create (or curate relevant existing video content) and present it to employees in training.

On the surface, this would seem like a logical way to go about it.

Times have changed, though. HR executives are longer the sole distributors of knowledge within an organization. Employees hailing from all departments and of varying seniority are encouraged, and often expected to share their expertise and relevant insights.

When incorporated correctly, video enables different organizational factions and personnel to contribute informative videos into the LXP.

Chrome extensions (such as RecTrace) enable employees to record webcam videos of themselves, an open tab, or both. Once fed into it, the LXP will encourage relevant employees to check these videos out.

 

With RecTrace, organizational experts can share quick video of themselves

 

Video content will always be up-to-date, thanks to this approach. The minute something is deemed no longer relevant, an appropriate organizational expert can easily record an updated video and have employees see it as soon as he or she drag and drop it into the LXP.

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Bite-sized learning

Attention spans around the world are decreasing, and – even though the infamous Microsoft study which claimed that humans have a smaller attention span than a goldfish has been disapproved – it remains no secret that people find it harder to concentrate.

When talking about employee training, this can have a dampening effect on the efficacy of your training program. This is why modern LXPs make use of shorter, bite-sized videos as compared to long-form ones.

As mentioned above, LXPs differ from conventional LMSs in that they enable everybody to participate in the learning process. Therefore, instead of lengthy training videos, employees benefit from bite-sized department-specific or task-specific videos that are highly targeted and thus result in better retention.

Additionally, smaller videos are easier to digest than longer ones as information is disseminated in chunks rather than all at once.

In fact, according to a report by Wyzowl, 95% of consumers believe that a video should be less than 2 minutes long. Although consumers watch videos for different reasons when compared with employees (such as making an educated buying decision or learning about a product or service), the fact that they find it more relevant and engaging is something that your employee training should also symbolize.

For employees using LXPs, bite-sized learning through smaller, objective-based videos, is much simpler and effective than having to take a complete course that lasts well over an hour. People can undertake learning a skill or objective at their own pace without having to rush the learning process.

Conclusion

Videos can make your LXP’s highly effective as a tool for learning and development.

Regardless of how high up your employees are in the organization’s hierarchy, LXPs with videos will provide them with an engaging platform to remember important info about your company and their roles in it.

Company videos included in your LXP can help your company’s employees perform well in the long run.

Originally published on January 2nd, 2020
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How Videos Enhance the Effectiveness of LXPs

by Ian Haynes time to read: 6 min
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