It’s a Tuesday afternoon. Someone in leadership says those nine words that have launched a thousand terrible training videos: “We’ll just make a quick training video for that.”

It sounds so simple. You’ve got a phone with a decent camera, someone willing to talk on screen, and a topic that needs to be covered. How hard could it be?

Ask Blockbuster. Their infamous two-part sales training series featured a talking head named “Buster Sales” who appeared on TVs throughout a video store to berate employees and critique their performance. It was so aggressively awkward that people still write about it today (check it out on YouTube!).  It is a masterclass in what happens when you treat training like a box to check rather than a thing that actually has to work.

Here’s what the “quick video” plan usually looks like in practice. Someone records themselves explaining a process, probably in one take with a ceiling fan visible in the background. They upload it to a shared drive. They send a link to the team with the subject line “Please watch before your shift.” Three people watch it. One person watches it at 2x speed while eating lunch. One person means to watch it and doesn’t. And the last person watches the whole thing, retains about 10% of it, and still asks their manager the same question the video was supposed to answer.

Training video production sits at the intersection of three things most people have never studied together: instructional design, adult learning theory, and visual communication. You need to understand how to structure content so the brain doesn’t tune out.  You need to know how adults actually absorb and retain information. And you need to know how to use visuals, pacing, and narration together, not just point a camera at someone and hit record.

The research on this is pretty clear. According to LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report, 94% of employees say they would stay longer at a company that invests in their continued learning and development. But Gallup found that only 12% of employees strongly agree their company does a great job onboarding new hires. There’s a real gap between what companies think they’re providing and what employees are actually experiencing.

One of the most common mistakes in DIY training videos is starting with a long explanation. Adult learners need to see why something matters before they’ll engage with it. They need to know within the first 30 seconds: what is this about, why should I care, and how am I going to use this? If you open with a company logo, a title slide, and three paragraphs of background information, you’ve already lost them.

There’s also a cognitive load issue that most people don’t think about. The brain can only hold so much new information at once. If your video covers eight concepts in five minutes, has dense text on every slide, and uses narration that reads those slides word for word, you haven’t trained anyone. You’ve created the sensation of training, but the information didn’t stick.  Good instructional design works differently. It introduces one idea at a time using real-world scenarios before explaining the concept behind it. It keeps on-screen text minimal, because if you’re reading the screen, you’re not listening to the narration. Visuals and audio work together, not in parallel.

None of this means you need a Hollywood budget or a six-month production timeline. It means the person designing your training video needs to actually know what they’re doing, before the camera ever turns on.

The scripting, the structure, the pacing, the visuals: these are decisions that get made in pre-production, not improvised on screen. And they’re the difference between a video your employees finish, remember, and actually use versus one that lives on a shared drive and is quietly never watched again.

If you want to learn more about how to create effective employee training , start here:  How to Create Effective Employee Training (Part 1). 

Sources: LinkedIn 2024 Workplace Learning Report; Gallup research on employee onboarding (via Paycor, 2026); Blockbuster sales training video documented in multiple publications including GetApp.