How to Create Engaging Training Content: Tips to Hook Your Employees 

Lack of employee engagement and attention is a nightmare for instructors and L&D Managers. As a leader of the whole course, you are working your best to create engaging training content to boost your employees’ performance and achieve course objectives.

We have compiled the finest strategies to improve your training content because we know it may be easy to become lost in the internet’s maze of tips and techniques. These are the techniques:

1. Storytelling

Have you heard that the earliest method of imparting knowledge is through storytelling? Remember when your parents used to tell you stories to teach you about the world? We should employ storytelling to provide the training materials for various reasons. 

First, it is an efficient way to impart knowledge since the plot enables employees to relate to virtual characters and their places in the company. Your stories can help people understand the workplace and why teaching staff in actual and hypothetical circumstances is preferable. Second, the power of storytelling lies in the ability to elicit an emotional response from students to the subject matter.

For example, instead of reading a thick book of protocols, learners can listen to stories about “Sam who didn’t follow the safety guidance which led to an unexpected accident.” Moreover, storytelling brings employees together around an experience. L&D Managers can use storytelling to foster group cohesion based on shared understanding. And it benefits the company as people feel more relatable to the company when they have common goals and values embedded in a story.

Tips to incorporate storytelling in training:

#1 Make sure your story is relatable to your daily workplace situation

Make the story relevant to the workplace as you write and edit it. Customizing scenarios based on corporate culture when creating engaging training content is a wise move.

For example, this is a short animated video about basic knowledge for the business law course that will be used to teach students of UNSW.

#2 Research your audience

For the best outcome when you create engaging training content, you should also consider your audience’s business culture. For instance, because workplaces in Asia are typically collaborative, the stories of employees there should foster a sense of belonging. However, the stories for workers in the US or other European nations should emphasize uniqueness. 

You must consider the employees’ demographics while creating engaging training content; addressing these two key questions will help you do so. 

• Where will the employees interact with the content? 
• What setting will they relate to the most?

#3 Pay attention to detail

Solid and vivid details are what bring stories to life for the reader. Your top aim when creating training stories should be to assist learners in visualizing the narrative. As a result, paying attention to tiny details like the characteristics of the characters or occasionally adding something strange will aid students in remembering the narrative and teachings for a more extended period. Once more, this stimulates the brain and intensifies the learning experience.

For more information to apply storytelling, take a look at:

• How To Improve The Use Of Storytelling In Training & eLearning

2. Incorporating brand features 

Branded learning relates to the company’s vision, mission, and culture. Collaborating with leaders helps you define the skills and develop training programs to align with the company’s business goals. The company can quickly get closer to each employee by creating a sense of friendliness using mascots or company signature characters.

There are 3 features that you can flexibly use for creating engaging training content: Colors, visualization, and brand personality.

1. Colors: What is more boring than a wall of text? A lesson without any color other than black and white. To make the lesson’s presentation more fun and vibrant, L&D Managers can combine various colors, especially ones relating to brand color scheme.
2. Visualization: To employees’ minds, there is nothing more suitable than visualization. It allows L&D Managers to present the information more interestingly by adding creative elements, for example, animation or mascots.
3. Brand personality: besides the brand’s unique personality, friendliness can be another for internal communications. Adding a little bit of fun would not harm but would give learners a decent learning experience.

F.Learning creates engaging training content by building a character and putting him in some funny situations in this animation video. Accordingly, the abstract concept of leadership seems to be easier to grasp. Also, it represents I&V employees’ personalities: fun and energetic.

Recommend reading:

• Branded Learning: 4 tips to Remain Brand Compliance in Employee Training Programs

3. Adding some humor

A session with slideshows and walls of text is “unappetizing” for everyone, and most of the time, after going through them all, we can remember very little information. This material creates no engagement with learners, leading to ineffective lessons and poor information intake. It is very simple to avoid this as you can add fun vibes training allowing employees to feel more open to new scenarios. This method creates engaging training content and makes the session less intimidating.

Below is an example of Simple Nursing training for staff. F.Learning Studio creates engaging training content using animation, colorful illustration, and expressive voice-over. It opens a friendly learning environment for the nurses. Instead of showing illustrated blood flowing through vessels, as usual, Simple Nursing decided to turn the red blood cells into characters and let them have a party and play the slide. Don’t be afraid that you might make the content a bit silly. Just watch this video to see how a bit of silliness wouldn’t do any harm:

4. Utilizing the best parts of the previous session

Isn’t it great to receive constructive feedback from learners after a lesson? Sometimes employees would come to you and ask to play a game again in the next session or reuse the same method. It can be a mascot, the organization’s branding guideline color, or a trainer. If they don’t usually do so, just come to ask them and list down elements that employees love most from old courses. Then partner with F.Learning to integrate them into the new online training method. 

This method not only satisfies learners’ demands but is even better when you integrate old and new information, and it is much more digestible for employees. 

Here is one of the 330 online courses we made for Permaculture. Learners love Geoff Lawton, so we devised this remote training idea to keep him throughout the online course series. All we need is to animate some training content to engage more learners.

5. Make it a game

Game-based learning occurs via practice, failure, and achieving objectives. The player starts slowly and advances until they can complete the most difficult levels. Games that have been carefully thought out and built will be challenging yet simple enough for the player to win. 

Employees make decisions and strive toward a goal in games. Customer service training, policy reviews, corporate training, team building, and staff awareness training are a few instances. Playing games increases student engagement and spurs workers to finish the program to receive better grades and rewards. This technique to include existing materials saves time, money, and labor.

To leverage training, you may want to use animated video games for interactive online training like this video from F.Learning.

NOTE:

When talking about gamification, people tend to think something very complicated and expensive but it’s not. Like the word “game” in gamification, you can start small with a simple game. There are many do-it-yourself tools to help you engage employees, like Jigsaw puzzles. All you need to do is choose a picture that describes the knowledge, then let the tool turn it into a puzzle game.

6. Interactive elements

One of the reasons for a bad online learning experience is the lack of interactive elements. Including interactive features allows employees to participate in lessons by evaluating, debating, researching, and producing. The interactive part supports active learning. They can put their knowledge to use in the real world. Employees can, through challenging choices, suggest solutions, and clearly express ideas in writing and conversation. 

The best training advice is to make the session more engaging by using interactive aspects like quizzes on websites like Kahoot, Flipkart, etc. Additionally, L&D Managers can monitor learner progress and behavior through interactive activities.

Recommend reading:

• Planning An Interactive Online Training: An in-depth guide

7. Scenario-based method

This approach offers a break from theories and fosters critical thinking. It entails employees working through a plot created around a challenging or complex topic. In an open, practical environment, workers must apply their subject-matter expertise, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills during this process. 

For example, during economic training, employees might compete in a computerized stock trading competition, or during a policy update course, they might role-play as they negotiate a labor issue.

There are various ways to present and deliver these examples to your learners. You can use videos, infographics, or news clips/recordings to spice things up, just like this video:

Why don’t you try animation in employee training? 

We have tried a list of methods to spice up your training content. Animation is a delivery way that can be suitable for every employee, regardless of the field or purpose. Don’t hesitate to contact F.Learning to see if we can put some magic into your training content and hook all of your employees into training sessions.

Read more:

• How to Create Training Materials for Your Employees
• 4 Types of Training Content to Spice Up Your Corporate Training Course