“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
– Confucius

Only 10% of training investment actually gets applied on a job in the way that actually impacts performance.

For more than a century studies have shown that “training transfer” from training sessions in companies is as low as 10%, which means companies are getting very low return on their training investment. That’s the bad news. The good news is that recent research shows us how to increase employee knowledge retention and achieve and receive a dramatically higher ROI.

In 1885 a German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted a groundbreaking study called “memory”. His goal was to determine how much knowledge people retained after a single learning event. His method was to test retention at intervals at between 20 minutes and 30 days.

The results which have been replicated by many researchers after Ebbinghaus, are disturbing for educators and trainers who believe that what they teach actually sinks in.

Ebbinghaus found that after 20 minutes subjects retained just 60% of what they learned. After nine hours, 40%. And after one month, just 20%.

This doesn’t say that low knowledge retention is inevitable. It doesn’t say that training can’t result in permanent mastery of skills, high performance, and a huge return on investment. All it says is that if you train people and don’t follow up you won’t get a very big return on your investment.

One of the best ways you can get return on your investment and enable training to ‘stick’ and have long lasting impact is to use the power of video.

If your employees, associates, customers or users can access regular, easy and clear video the impact on their training success can be immense.

You can use it to re-inforce training points, to remind them of key factors and to maintain consistency with the training. Plus they are available to use again and again and you can even put a programme of learning in place with video materials, over a period of time, significantly increasing the successful delivery of the messages.

Gone are the traditional ‘health and safety’ training videos. And it is no longer that training videos should be dull, boring and half an hour long. Yes you may have 30 minute worth of content to deliver, but you would never deliver that in one go with a video nowadays. You would chunk it down, make it section-able. Make it interactive. Make it work!

We have many examples of saving clients a lot of money through using video as a training tool. We have also saved time and resources and increased success rates through the use of well planned, well executed and well used training video material.

Here are just a few ways that video can work as a training tool within your organisation:

• As a tool to induct, motivate and introduce new employees to an organisation.
• As a series of short, bite size pieces of video to convey important procedures and operations.
• To deliver product training to customers, enhancing their customer experience and reducing the amount of time your staff are dealing with problems or giving advice on product set up or maintenance.
• Recording of live training sessions for staff to be able to take away and re-inforce their learning and action points.
• To capture unique expertise from within and outside your organisation.

There are so many ways that video can be used as a training tool. Essentially if you use training within your organisation, if you need to be using training more or if you have issues with staff, customers or users that can solved with training then using video could be the best decision you make. Once produced it can save time, money, maintain consistency and be used again and again, providing a huge return on your investment.

You don’t have to think along the traditional lines of video though – there are so many effective ways that video can work as a training tool. Your first step is to identify the issue that you need help with and then talk to a training video professional who can help you to brainstorm different ways of training video material working for you, within your timeframes, budget and in order to achieve your objectives.

Watch out for future articles where I will explore different types of training video material in more detail and the specific benefits they have had for organisations.

Lastly here are some pieces of viewing for you to have a cup of tea with!

This is not how we would recommend doing it – but you can remind yourself of some basics about office safety here….

and lastly, just for fun……..women know your limits!!!!!……