Every time you explain the same thing to a new hire, you are paying twice for something you could have recorded once.
TL;DR Record in the moment rather than scheduling a studio day. Two to five minutes per video, one topic each. Name them so they are findable. Add a short check so you know it was watched and understood.
Record in the moment
The reason training libraries never get built is that they get scheduled.
The method that works
Next time you explain something to somebody, hit record. Screen record for software, phone camera for physical tasks. Explain it exactly as you would anyway. Stop recording. Upload. Name it.
Total additional time: about ninety seconds.
Twenty videos in a month from work you were doing regardless. That is a library.
Do not re-record for polish. Nobody watching an internal training video cares about production. They care whether it answers the question.
Length and scope
Two to five minutes. One topic.
Why short wins
- Findable. Somebody needing one answer does not want a forty-minute induction video.
- Rewatchable on site, on a phone, standing in a hallway.
- Cheap to replace when the process changes.
- Actually watched. Long videos get skipped and then claimed as watched.
Split anything longer. “Using the job app” becomes eight videos: opening a job, adding photos, recording parts, completing, and so on.
What to record first
| Priority | Type | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Asked repeatedly | “How do I add a part to a job?” |
| 2 | Week-one essentials | Van setup, app basics, site arrival |
| 3 | Safety and compliance | Isolation procedures, PPE, certification steps |
| 4 | Only one person knows | The single-point-of-failure knowledge |
| 5 | Quality standards | What good looks like, with examples |
Start with the questions you answered this week. That list writes itself and it is the highest-value content.
Naming and organisation
Findability is the entire difference between a library and a folder of videos.
Naming convention
[Area] - [Task] - [Version date]
App - Adding parts to a job - 2026-03
Site - Arrival and customer greeting - 2026-01
Safety - Gas isolation procedure - 2025-11
Structure
- Group by when it is needed, not by department. “Week one”, “On site”, “In the app”, “Safety”.
- A single index page listing everything with links.
- Search that works. If your platform’s search is poor, the index page carries the load.
- Link videos from the point of use. A QR code on the equipment beating any portal.
Knowledge checks
Watching is not learning, and you need to know which happened.
Keep checks minimal
- Three questions per video, maximum.
- Practical, not recall. “A customer says the pressure gauge is at zero. What do you check first?” beats “what is the correct operating pressure range?”
- Open book. The point is competence, not memory.
- Retake freely. This is training, not an exam.
For physical skills, a check is a supervised task, not a quiz. Record who signed it off and when.
Track completion, because unwatched safety training is a liability as well as a gap.
Onboarding structure
Sequence the library into a week-one path.
Day 1: Who we are, how we work, safety essentials, app setup. Four videos, plus a real conversation.
Day 2: Site arrival, customer greeting, the standard job walkthrough. Then shadowing.
Day 3: Job completion, photos, records, invoicing. Shadowing.
Day 4: Common jobs, one video each. Supervised work.
Day 5: Review, questions, first solo job with check-in.
Video replaces the repeated explanation, not the human contact. A new hire watching videos alone all week will leave. Pair every module with real supervised work.
Standardising delivery
The commercial argument for all of this.
Record the standard
- What a completed job looks like, photographed properly.
- The exact words for the customer walkthrough.
- How the site should be left.
- The pencil-it question for the next service.
Show good and bad side by side. Two photos of the same finished job, one meeting standard and one not, teaches more than a paragraph of description.
Consistency is what lets you scale. Customers accept a different technician if the experience is identical. They do not if it is a lottery.
Keeping it current
Out-of-date training is actively harmful.
- Date every video visibly.
- Review annually, and immediately when a process or interface changes.
- Archive rather than delete, so nobody follows an old version by accident.
- Anybody can flag a wrong video in one message, and gets thanked for it.
Re-recording is cheap. That is the advantage of the informal format. A polished production nobody wants to redo becomes permanently out of date.
Tooling
Whatever you already have.
- Screen recording with a shareable link, for software.
- Phone camera for physical tasks.
- A shared drive or an existing team platform for storage.
- A simple document as the index.
Do not buy a learning management system for a team of ten. The overhead exceeds the benefit and it becomes another login nobody uses.
Measure it
- Time to first solo job for a new hire.
- Repeat questions. The clearest signal of a missing video.
- Completion rates on the week-one path.
- Consistency of job outcomes across technicians. Callbacks by person is the honest measure.
Record one video tomorrow, the next time somebody asks you a question you have answered before. Ninety seconds of extra effort, and you never explain it a third time.
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