Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Video Training

There's a series of commercials on late-night television that advertise video-based training for computer novices. Although I can't help but laugh every time I see these corny commercials, video-based training is actually a good idea. After all, for far less money than it costs to attend a Microsoft certification class, you can have a video-based class that you can play over again any time you want. More importantly, though, video-based training makes it possible to train the rest of your IT staff at no additional cost. You pay for the video once, and then use it in whatever way is the most beneficial to your organization.

There are several good video-based training products on the market. One that I particularly like is Clip Training. The essence of Clip Training is that, rather than requiring you to watch a huge, monolithic video, the program is task-oriented. In other words, you can simply click on the task you need to know -- for example, setting up an Exchange mailbox -- and then watch a short video that shows you how to perform the task.

Another video-based training product that I find useful is the Video Mentor series from Pearson Education. These videos go into a lot more depth than the Clip Training and are very similar to attending a certification class.

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