Employee training is something that no business can leave to chance. Ensuring the message hits home is often not so much about what is said as how it is said. That’s why using a professional voiceover is more than just a “nice to have.” Whether it is essential safety training to avoid accidents, injuries and lawsuits or perhaps development training so that employees can learn new skills and advance their careers, training staff effectively benefits both the employee and the business.
As with so many other things, such as team meetings and company announcements, training tends to take place online these days. This brings both benefits and additional risks. Most obviously, delivering training via an internet url is quicker, easier and less disruptive than assembling personnel in a classroom environment. However, ensuring that staff participate and take in the material is another matter.
Polished presentation by a professional voice artist
You might be great at delivering training in a face to face environment, but when it comes to presenting material over the internet, it makes a world of difference when you hire voice actors online. Voice over work is a specialist skill, and a professional voice actor will have the skill to capture and hold the learner’s attention.
You might think that because you know your business and you have created the training, you are the right person to deliver it. That is simply not the case. Look at it this way. Adrian Newey is the greatest Formula 1 car designer of recent times, but he has always handed his creations over to the likes of Ayrton Senna, Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen to get the best out of them, he doesn’t try racing them himself.
When an amateur tries to do a voiceover, the results are invariably disappointing. This is because the professional voice actor knows how to add nuance and inflexion, as well as breathing the right way and getting the timing just so.
That’s far from ideal from a perspective of getting your point across. But if it causes the learner to mentally dial out during a task-critical training presentation, or perhaps during a course on health and safety, the consequences do not bear thinking about.
The right voice to deliver the right message
We talk about being “on message” all the time. Yet we’ve all been guilty of failing to practice what we preach from time to time. Get it wrong in front of 100 course delegates and you will soon be yesterday’s news. Mess up on a corporate video and it will be hard to recover.
Shortlist some professional candidates on the grounds of how their voice corresponds with your brand identity. It might be warm or formal or avuncular or light-hearted. Whichever it is, you need to ensure it matches your message, and a professional voice actor will make certain it happens.
Logical flow based on learning objectives
If the training material is a mess, even the most polished and professional voice over artist can only do so much to polish it. Give them something solid to work with. Don’t get bogged down in the details too soon, what matters is a sound, logical structure holding all the material together. Without this, it will inevitably fall apart, and employees will lose interest.
A good way of achieving this is by ensuring your training content is built around basic learning objectives. These are fundamentals of the training course and basic things learners should be able to do or understand when they have completed the course, module or chapter. Structuring content around learning objectives helps keep the training both focused and concise.
Add appealing visuals to your professional voiceover
The human eye will be drawn to visuals but will wander elsewhere in about eight seconds if the material does not capture the attention. That doesn’t mean filling the screen with animations, although they have their place. More importantly, whatever learners are looking at, whether it is a chart, a video, or an infographic should flow and make sense.
Make sure visuals use company colors, branding and format too – it encourages workers to take it more seriously and shows that the company is invested in the training.
