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Let's be honest. Most corporate training videos are a waste of time. Not because video doesn't work. Video absolutely works. The problem is that most organisations treat a training video like a checkbox. Make it, upload it, move on. That's not a training strategy. That's just content hoarding.

If you're an L&D manager or a training facilitator in South Africa right now, you're sitting on one of the most powerful communication tools available to you. And a lot of you are using it wrong. Not because you're not smart. Because nobody stopped to ask the right questions before the camera rolled.

That stops today. Let's talk about what actually works.

Nobody Cares About Your Training Video. Yet.

Here's the hard truth. Your employees don't wake up excited to watch a training video. They've got targets to hit, customers to deal with, and a full inbox. Your video is competing with all of that. So if it's boring, too long, or feels irrelevant to their actual job, they're clicking through without watching. And you've learned nothing about whether your training worked.

The fix isn't a bigger budget. It's a sharper brief.

Before you think about production, answer this one question: what do you want someone to do differently after watching this? Not know. Do. Real behaviour change. If your answer is "understand our compliance policy", that's not specific enough. If your answer is "correctly complete a safety checklist before starting a shift", now you're getting somewhere.

One training video. One outcome. That's the rule. Break it and you lose your audience somewhere in the middle, and they don't come back.

Short Videos Win. Every Single Time.

Stop making 20-minute training videos. I'm serious. Nobody is watching them. Completion rates for long-form e-learning content sit at around 20%. Microlearning videos, those between 2 and 5 minutes, hit completion rates of around 80%. That's not a small difference. That's the gap between training that actually reaches your people and training that just generates a report saying it did.

Short doesn't mean shallow. Short means you've done the hard work of figuring out what matters and cutting everything else. That's harder to create than a long video. It takes more discipline. But it's the only format that respects your learner's time, and that respect is what gets the video watched.

If your content genuinely needs more than five minutes, break it into a series. Three focused videos of three minutes each will outperform one nine-minute video every time. Your learners can watch one between meetings. They can rewatch a specific section without sitting through everything again. That's how adults actually learn.

Live Action or Animation: Stop Overthinking It

The format debate goes on way too long in most organisations. Live action or animation? Both work. Both fail. The format follows the content, not the other way around.

Use live action when your training is about people. Customer conversations, physical tasks, workplace behaviour. You need a real human on screen because tone and body language are part of what you're teaching. Animation can't replace that.

Use animation when your content is abstract or process-heavy. System workflows, policy explainers, anything that has no physical form. Animation is also the smarter choice for multilingual training. Build the visuals once. Swap the voiceover for each language version. In a country with 11 official languages, that flexibility has real value.

And if your content has both human and process elements, consider a hybrid. A real person for the context, animation for the complexity. It costs more but it earns its budget.

Story Is What Makes People Remember

Most training videos present information. The good ones tell a story. There's a big difference.

Information gets processed and forgotten. Story gets remembered. That's not an opinion. It's how the human brain works. We track characters. We care about what happens next. We remember outcomes we watched play out. A training video built around a real scenario, a person facing a real work challenge, making a decision, living with the consequence, teaches in a completely different way than a list of facts read over a slide deck.

You don't need a Hollywood budget for this. You need a writer who understands your audience and your content. Someone who can take a compliance requirement or a process change and turn it into a situation your learners actually recognise. That skill is worth paying for. It's the difference between a video your team watches once to get the tick and one they actually remember six months later.

South African workforces are diverse, multilingual, and spread across very different working environments. A story that reflects that reality, with characters and settings your learners recognise, lands harder than anything generic. Represent your actual people on screen. It matters more than you think.

The Only Metric That Actually Matters

Completion rates are fine. Assessment scores are useful. But the only metric that really tells you whether your training video worked is this: did behaviour change?

Did the person do something differently because of what they watched? Did the safety incident rate drop? Did the customer satisfaction score improve? Did the new system get used correctly? That's the question your training video exists to answer.

Most organisations never ask it. They measure uploads and clicks and ticks in boxes. Those numbers feel like progress. They're not. They're just evidence that the video exists.

Start with the outcome you want. Build your training video backwards from that outcome. Keep it short, keep it honest, make it look like your actual workplace, and tell a real story. Do those things and your training video stops being a box to tick and starts being something that actually changes how people work.