Is Video Training for You?
When you are assessing available training options, it may not be immediately clear whether a weekend workshop style training would suit you better than an audio or video training program.
Knowing your preferred learning styles can be helpful. (Take our quick free test to determine your learning style strengths.)
But if you find that your preferences for audio and visual learning are pretty evenly balanced, you’ll need additional criteria to help you choose. Similarly, if your kinesthetic preference hugely dominates your audio and visual preferences, and you’re committed to choosing a distance training program, you’ll need some other tools to help you make your best decision.
Because video training is very effective for people with both auditory and visual learning strengths (the numbers of visual and auditory learners far exceed those of kinesthetic learners) video training serves a large segment of the population. If you have a strong need to learn by doing, you are likely a kinesthetic learner. If you are, you can also use video training effectively. Simply pause or stop the video training device once a concept has been explained or demonstrated so that you can get “hands on” with the material being taught.
Another benefit of video training is that just a few seconds of video can shown what could take thousands of words to describe. When video training is used in software tutorials, the teacher can show you the menu selections you need to make in order to get the desired result. The same is true for management training videos that teach effective negotiation skills by first describing the skills and then showing people actually using them in a role-play demonstration.
A very obvious benefit to video training is its ease of accessibility. If you choose an on-line video training program, you will be able to access it from home, from work or through any wi-fi connection. If you choose a program that is driven by DVDs, they are small and light weight enough that it’s easy to take your training with you, while traveling on business or on your daily commute. Put on your headphones, open your laptop and make an hour on the commuter train into an hour of video training. If you’re ever interrupted, it’s easy to review parts of the training that you may feel you haven’t fully absorbed.
The last and greatest benefit of video training is the ability it gives training companies to offer their programs at rates that were just not possible when they had to provide training venues and live teachers. That’s how MIBOSO’s Self Directed training program came to be. Over the past ten years, the high demand for our personal branding programs could never be fully served by our limited number of brand strategists. The pricing of our programs also put them out of many people’s reach.
For years we were told that the solution was to create certification programs and train massive numbers of brand strategists. But that didn’t seem to be a very practical solution, as the best brand strategists have very specific and skills sets, corporate branding experience, a high level of creativity and an entrepreneurial spirit. As we are not willing to allow any but the best brand strategists to work with our clients, broad scale certification was not an option.
But over the years it became clear that unless we went way outside our “box,” we were stuck in our rut of providing high quality support to a relatively small number of clients. After nearly two years of wrestling with this dilemma, we found the breakthrough we had been seeking. By taking our Authentic Personal Branding process from a one-on-one to one-on-twenty-or-so program conducted in person and via telephone, to an on-line interactive audio, video and written training program, we could both increase the numbers of people we served and decrease the cost of our programs.
Is video training for you?
Whether you are an individual seeking new skills or a training company trying to figure out how to get its training products to more people at more affordable prices, video training offers many benefits that are well worth considering.