How to build a just-in-time training program

Organizations investing in employee training and enablement see profits to the tune of $1 billion — becoming magnets for not only attracting top talent but also retaining it. If you’re not driving similar benefits from your team, the culprit may be the dusty, one-size-fits-all employee training program you have in place.

Employees agree. A recent survey found:

• 50% of the unsatisfied employees say their learning is irrelevant to them
• 37% also wish they had more control over what they learned
• And, 28% wish the content was broken into shorter sessions

The solution? Just in time learning that offers shorter, easily digestible video training resources on topics employees actually want help in, which ensures they:

• Learn what they need
• When they need it
• Wherever they want to (desktop or mobile)

There’s a misconception that creating video content only adds work to time-starved managers’ plate.

We come bearing good news: planning, recording, and organizing short videos doesn’t need to be a time intensive task requiring advanced video creation chops. With resources like one take video creation tool, you can create, edit, manage, and share department-specific, meaningful learning and development content for your teams.

Democratize the learning process with shorter, targeted videos

Traditional L&D initiatives center around pulling employees from their day-to-day to sit through (yet) another live training workshop the HR thinks is relevant to them.

The problem is that employees typically forget 50-80% of what they learn in two days. By day 30, they hardly remember 2-3% — simply because they don’t reinforce learning or get the opportunity to apply what they learned right away.

In contrast, bite-sized, role-specific training videos have higher retention rates.

Employees can quickly search their company’s library of learning content for relevant content, topics, and training that can be immediately applied to their day-to-day job.

This puts learners in charge of their own learning. In turn, making a just-in-time learning program super impactful, thanks to its timeliness, relevance, and digestibility.  

Fortunately, just as short, training videos are easy to consume, they’re easy and intuitive to create as well.

• They don’t require a padded budget or an external team for production
• Employees can also create them for their peers, which makes company-wide knowledge sharing a breeze

In fact, managers, trainers, and employees can generate scripts with AI, record their screen or face with the help of a teleprompter to get the video creation ball rolling — never requiring a fancy recording studio or having to master advanced video editing skills first.

In the next section, let’s take you through how you can create department- or role-specific, easily accessible training videos.

Make video creation easier for beginners and video pros alike

Just like artists depend on their creativity to produce masterpieces, the success of your video learning program relies on how easily you can make videos.

Thankfully, intuitively creating video is easier with AI-powered video tools that help with everything from recording and editing videos, which can then be collected and organized in a secure, central video library.

To start, try following our five step video creation and production workflow for more relevant training content:

1. Plan

Dedicate this phase to decide what learning content you need to make and who will be involved in creating it. The planning phase for your video training program includes:

Identify employee knowledge gaps

Review your training program’s data to identify knowledge gaps or, more specifically, information and training organizations need employees to know to do their jobs. Use all the data as well as manager and employee feedback to create a stakeholder-approved curriculum that gives you a list of topics to cover.

Additionally you can survey employees to learn what topics are valuable to them.

Determine who the best person is to create videos

Because just-in-time training focuses on empowering employees with role-specific learning videos, production needs to be split between department heads and employees.

For instance, if a sales team manager finds a rep’s cold outreach framework has been driving great results, they can encourage that sales rep to share their knowledge with teammates through a recorded video.

For each video topic you’re looking to cover, you organize a list or spreadsheet with columns to identify the production owner (the person creating and editing the video), and the video reviewer or stakeholder.

2. Script

It’s easy to think of writing a script for your short video as that ‘extra’ step in the workflow.

In reality, video scripting is a time saver. Without it, you’ll find yourself:

• Doing multiple takes to get your messaging right
• Veering off topic, making the video long and unengaging for target viewers

Don’t have the time to write video scripts? An AI script generator can help speed through this step.

All you need to do is:

• Feed a prompt, rough notes, or a bulleted outline into the AI script generator
• Select the script length and tone (funny, formal, casual, etc.)
• Hit Generate script, review your script to make needed adjustments and you’re done 🎉

3. Record

Next, pick from these three ways to make a video:

• Record your talking head using your desktop camera
• Record your screen with your voice-over
• Record both your screen and a talking head

These videos are simple to create — never demanding much time in production.

If you’re making a video with a talking head, just make sure you’re recording in a well-lit room, projecting confidence with your on-screen body language, and maintaining eye contact with the camera. If you need to add a bit more polish to your recording, you can upgrade your lighting set up and experiment with a few tips to look great on video.

The best part? You can generate your video script and start recording from the Record Studio. Or you can make videos straight from your browser with Vimeo’s Screen Recorder extension.

For more tips on a better training recording, check out how to use a screen recorder to better communicate with employees. 

Pro tip: No need to print out, memorize, or open a note app to read the video script. Simply, copy and paste your script in our teleprompter (available both on mobile and desktop). Adjust font size and scroll speed and the text will display on your screen as you record — never showing in the final video 🎉

4. Review

Once you’ve recorded, enable comments on your video and share it with your team members for approval.

Reviewers can find the option to add comments under the player, type in feedback on specific time stamps, or record a video response by clicking the record icon.

5. Edit

With feedback in, work on making your video content engaging and accessible. Let’s break the process down into steps:

Remove repetitive lines, filler words, and long pauses

Use the text-based video editing feature in your Vimeo video editor to remove word gaps with no sound, filler words, and footage containing no speech straight from the audio transcript.

Add captions to your video to make it more accessible

Captions increase view time by 12% while improving your message’s comprehension among other benefits. 

Instead of manually adding them though, select the video in your Video Library and click on the CC icon in the panel below. Now enable automated closed captions and you’re good to go.

Break down long videos into short chapters

Recorded a long video? You can always slice it into shorter videos. 

Or, if the video covers various aspects of a topic, add chapters to it and let employees jump between sections relevant to them. You can do this by clicking on the interactivity tab on your video page, followed by Chapters and +Add a chapter.

Next, type in a title for the chapter and edit the timestamp beside it to specify where it should play in your video. Select Add chapters to include more chapters and hit Save when you’re done editing them.

Add a video thumbnail

Either select a specific video frame from your video or choose an auto-generated video thumbnail by clicking Random from the Edit thumbnail option in the General tab.

Customize the video player

Finally, add a touch of branding by changing the video player’s colors to your brand colors. 

You can do this by selecting the Player icon from the right hand panel on the video settings page. Add your brand color’s hex color code and you’ve a custom player ready.

Pro tip: Have a bank of recorded Zoom live trainings and workshops? Don’t let them gather dust. Drag and drop them one by one in your video player’s upload page. Click on the scissor icons on the player’s bottom and trim the video to the desired portion using the timeline handles. This lets you edit Zoom videos and recycle them as on-demand training content.

Put learners in the driver’s seat

The learners’ journey is never linear. They learn what they want to depending on when they need to.

Your job is to empower employees with all the training resources they’d need on a specific topic.

Whether you’re creating short recorded videos or uploading fully produced content to a video hosting platform, there are ways to layer in more engaging experiences with interactive videos.

Unlike linear videos that viewers passively watch in their entirety, interactive videos are interactive and non-linear.

Viewers can jump to different chapters you create based on what they want to learn. They can click elements like hotspots and overlays to get access to more information, linked training assets, checklists, and PDFs.

For example, you create a parent, interactive video on sales multithreading — dividing it into different chapters such as single-threading vs. multithreading, how to multithread using LinkedIn ads, multithreading benefits, etc.

An employee can then choose to watch whichever chapter they’re most interested in learning about first (instead of having to watch the full video). They can also easily access multithreading templates you link to in the video to practically apply what they learn.

To get started with interactive videos, you can either:

• Break down a long video recording and add chapters and interactive elements 
• Compile shorter videos on a topic into a long video and create a ‘build you own learning journey’ video

So how do you make a training video interactive? Add the following elements using Vimeo Interactive:

• Interactive hotspots that are clickable points in your video linking to related content, say another video or PDF.
• Branching to create ‘build you own learning journey’ style training videos. It works by allowing viewers to take different paths in your video based on what they choose from the interactive options you give them.
• Time triggers or events that occur at a specific time in your video without a viewer needing to click on anything. For instance, set time triggers for feedback forms or polls within your training videos. 
• Video overlays that add an extra, contextual layer in your training video that shows up when a viewer interacts with a hotpot or when the video reaches a specific time triggered event. You can add anything from another video to bonus learning materials like slides and PDFs with overlays.

Pro tip: Pair your learning content with video quizzes to test employees’ knowledge. Here’s an example of a hotel staff training quiz to teach staff about how to deliver superior customer service:

Drive better engagement with live training sessions

Adding live training to your just-in-time program is yet another way to improve employees’ learning experience. No wonder, 88% of organizations use virtual classrooms to train their employees.

Keep in mind though: one-way broadcasting is rarely effective for keeping employees’ attention.

To maximize the value you can offer with live workshops, make sure you engage attendees throughout the session using features like:

• Polls
• Live chat
• Q&A sessions

These create an interactive learning environment to engage employees while giving you the opportunity to source feedback.

You can also ask employees to share their successful tactics in a recorded video.

Then play them in a live setting to encourage peer-to-peer, bottom-up approach to learning. Axalta, a global coatings company that uses Vimeo for employee training uses this approach. They ask painters to record their techniques and submit them to the Axalta team. The team then plays those videos in their virtual trainings to give feedback in real time.

According to Axalta’s Virtual Training Manager, Steve Hamaday, “Vimeo helps us easily create high-quality live streams to share.”

The good news: lives treaming not only gives you the audience engagement tools you need, but also guarantees HD streaming in 1080p. This makes sure employees get the best viewing experience even with limited bandwidth.

For Axalta, this has also made it possible to retain its training accuracy despite it being hosted virtually.

“If our instructor was demonstrating the use of a spray gun — which requires a certain finesse of a wrist roll — on a standard webinar platform, we’d experience frame skipping,” Steve explains.

“We found that missing those fractions of a frame was a huge deal for our painters, as they could be missing important learning points. We are able to get a much higher quality video product using a platform like Vimeo compared to traditional webinar software.”

As you gear up to host live trainings, make sure you dedicate time to planning your:

• Live curriculum content and schedule
• Trainers (including any pre-recorded employee videos)
• Engagement plan (what polls you’ll host, when you’ll take questions, etc.)
• Post event, on-demand availability, and ways you’ll recycle the content into shorter videos

When you host training sessions with Vimeo, you can easily do half the work before the livestream by preloading and organizing your content in the browser-based tool.

For instance, from the preview player (shown below), you can:

Pre-select a layout for your event from the library of 18 different options available in the preview player:

Build out scenes or what will show (slides, Q&A graphic, etc.) on the screen throughout the virtual training:

For more information, check out how build out your event scenes in Vimeo.

Reinforce training with an organized and accessible library of content

The next step is to make it all accessible. You can do this by hosting and managing videos in Vimeo’s secure Video Library.

With Video Library, organize videos into workspaces by topics, teams, or departments. You can also further organize workspaces by creating folders and subfolders so you’ve targeted content for different competencies and roles. 

As Axalta’s Virtual Training Manager, Steve Hamaday notes, “Organizing our training videos by teams or topics — all quickly searchable and on a stunning branded homepage — helps us shorten ramp up time and connect with teams at scale.”

There are four ways a video library supports teams:

• Host training content in a secure place

Vimeo gives you built-in security features like SSO, user provisioning (SCIM), and administrative controls for workspaces and folders. You can also control access as needed — giving learners only viewer access, for example. 

• Make your content accessible to employees

When you upload recordings to a video library, we auto-transcribe them so employees can quickly search for what they’re looking for using keywords

In fact, learners can view training content from both their desktop and mobile. This way, you give them the freedom to learn from anywhere — even when they’re on the go. Worrying they might have questions? Encourage staff to add comments to the videos to ask their questions.

• Simplify reviewing videos

Folks with ‘contributor’ access to your training gallery can add videos to their private space within the team account or edit and move them to shared team folders. They can also add time-stamped comments to videos to share their feedback on videos other team members upload. 

• Make it easy to keep all content up to date

Admins in the Video Library can delete outdated videos so employees don’t reference dated content.

Surface data to understand the impact of training content

Last but not the least, take steps to improve your just-in-time training program by sourcing feedback from employees.

Polls and video comments are two ways to do so.

Another way is to review your video analytics for an understanding of what content resonates with viewers. Vimeo gives you user-level analytics that show views and average view time.

You can further review these metrics at video- and user-levels to see:

• Which individual logged-in users watched a video
• What videos an individual logged-in user is watching

With enough data, you can also identify trends around what types of content is engaging your employees the most.

Create a world-class employee training program starting today

Remember: creating learning resources that resonate with your employees doesn’t have to be hard.

Just make sure you source feedback from the folks who’ll use your content throughout your just in time training program.

And with the right, one take solution, production is also going to be easy since it gives you all the tools you need to create, edit, and manage videos in one, safe place.

Learn how to better train employees with video