I had two interesting conversations with clients in the past few weeks.
Both clients were asking how to produce videos but the reasons were a bit different to what I usually encounter.
Mostly our demand for video training up to now has been around recording and making effective videos on your smartphone – short engaging videos of less than a minute for social media. Our popular Mobile Video Storytelling online course covers that very well, I think!
But these two calls were different.
The first conversation was with a client who wanted to record and edit videos on his computer to teach his own staff – videos replacing staff manuals for staff who are now working remotely and will no longer spend 100 percent of their time in the offices. So now they can all be taught online with these pre-recorded videos – and their training manager just has to make one induction video instead of a separate induction for each staff member.
While they will continue to train up people individually, they are now moving over their staff manuals to videos instead. Interesting.
In response, we are developing an online course that can teach him and some of his team how to record longer videos on their screens and then edit on their laptops or computers – adding text, logos and some voiceover if necessary. Watch this newsletter for more.
The second call was also interesting but for a separate reason. This was from a charity that relies a lot on corporate donations. Up to now, they have produced written applications and then a written report on the outcomes of their funding.
Now the corporate donors want a video application and a video report! No pressure then.
So the charity wanted training on smartphone videos for their members to make giving short interviews explaining how the funding made a difference in their lives. Our Mobile Video Storytelling course is perfect for that – we are looking at a tutor-led group session with them.
It got me thinking and remembering a column by economist David McWilliams in the Irish Times a few weeks back, in which he described how we are on the cusp of the fourth industrial age, in which technology will change (and is already radically changing) how we work and learn
Remote working, portfolio careers (thank you Charles Handy for predicting that as far back as 1994), and online learning are now here to stay.
The global e-learning market – via live and recorded video lessons – is already worth 250 billion dollars, according to McWilliams. Who would have thought we would all pivot so quickly and easily from in-person lessons and workshops to online and pre-recorded lessons? I agree that being in an in-person group has its advantages, but the future will be a mix of the two.
When we cancelled our planned 2020 workshops in March of that year as the pandemic led to lockdown, I switched over to my Teachable channel and was lucky to find a local studio to make our videos in. I didn’t realize at the time that we would never go back to workshops again – the ease of online training can’t be replaced.
I have polled my own clients and nobody wants to go back to in-person training – the advantages of flexibility, time saving and independence it gives learners can’t be rivalled.
Video production is becoming as essential a skill as driving a car for many jobs, whether in communications, education or management.
A recent blog by Techsmith highlights that learning and educational content alone drives over a billion views on YouTube each year.
Video is replacing text-based articles, presentation and e-books and manuals as tools for learning. Employees are 75% more likely to watch a video to learn than reading email, documents or manuals.
So that’s the future – video.
It doesn’t have to be difficult. My mission here at the Rathdown Media Institute is to demystify the video production process. We have so many tools now to make it easier to make our own videos – cameras on our phones and on our laptops and great editing software.
If you need a guide through the jungle of options for video making that are out there, give us a call to help you through. Our courses are successfully helping people all the time to become confident video makers.
If you would like to learn more, email us at [email protected] or phone us at 01 2542984.
Aileen O’Meara is a former RTE journalist and the founder of the Rathdown Media Institute, based in Blackrock, Co Dublin and wherever you get your courses!
