Interactive Video For Soft Skills Training: The Best Solution For Your Corporate eLearning
Employees today have such high workloads and busy schedules that sometimes taking time out to train isn’t on top of their to-do list.
eLearning: The Solution For Many Organisations
In providing greater flexibility, eLearning has provided a convenient solution to the training needs of many organisations. The only problem: for the learner, the content often lacks engagement. The rise of interactive video has emerged as a very appealing solution to this problem, and its applicability is much broader than you might think.
What Is Interactive Video?
Whilst traditional videos can engage learners more than static content, interactive videos make the learner an active participant. It could be through making choices in branching scenarios or clicking on hotspots or video overlays. The more engaged and in control the learner is, the higher the retention levels will be; music to the ears of every right-minded L&D professional.
As well as putting the learner directly into the situation, interactive video can be designed to quiz the learner at checkpoints throughout the course. By building assessments into videos, the learner and manager will be able to receive feedback on progress, wins, and fails. Again, this is a great incentive to improve in the future and to make learning relevant to the job.
How Can Interactive Video Develop Soft Skills?
Soft skills are personal attributes which allow people to interact with others effectively. At first glance, it might not be the first area of learning you’d associate with interactive video.
In the corporate environment, soft skills often underpin the company’s brand values. The way people behave is the way the company is perceived. So how can interactive video help learning?
With the ability to personalise and present realistic scenarios, containing behavioural choices, specific skill areas can be targeted in an authentic way. The choices can accurately reflect a person’s role. And they can be subtle and nuanced, as is often needed with soft skills.
Once a learning manager has defined their outcomes, interactive videos can match learning objectives by including problem-solving, gamification, role play, case studies or key speakers (to name a few). And all this interactivity can be tracked to provide the learner and organisation with greater feedback.
Soft Skill Training
Although not interactive, Media Partners developed Respectful Communicator: The part you play. The online learning uses video to train employees on inclusion, respect, and communication in the workplace. Whilst there is no interactivity in their training, the course provides small scenario clips and on-screen trainers to demonstrate guidelines that enable employees to immediately put skills into practice; a great start to the use of video for training.
In 2009, Hilton Hotels developed a training video game for use on the PSP console. Choosing from a range of four job roles, employees had to interact and work around the hotel as they would on the real job. A great element added to the game was employees being scored against a unique system to improve customer service. Despite being beneficial for improving employee skills and customer service for the Hilton, there was an obvious limitation; it could only be used on a PSP console.
Changing the norm of ‘boring’ eLearning for soft skills and to increase learner engagement, many eLearning platforms were developed. Some eLearning platforms work to address corporate work training for poor performance and other workplace issues, and they actually deliver training using an immersive gaming method.
Most of them are based on the premise that experiencing situations first hand is the best way to learn. As much of the learning in this area is already done through role-play; interactive video allows that role-play learning to take place online.
Using a gamified approach, users play a newly hired manager, and their learning experience unfolds in different ways, depending on the decisions they make. Each choice can be recorded so that a report can be produced at the end of each scenario. This enables learners to understand where they made the right decision or where they went wrong so that in the future they are able to make better choices.
Final Words
With soft skills being so valued by employers, interactive video is a cost-effective way to help build them in a safe and supportive way. It’s certainly changing the scope and potential of how these skills can be learned, and both learners and the organisations they work for are likely to benefit.
