Product videos are usually made for customers. The same skills work inside a company: showing how a tool works, what a process looks like and where to find things. This article looks at what the research says about learning from video, and how to plan a small first set of onboarding and training videos.
Onboarding is where many companies fall short
Gallup has measured onboarding for years. In a 2021 article for leaders, Emily Wetherell and Bailey Nelson reported that only 12% of US employees say their company does a good job of onboarding, and that only 29% of new hires feel fully prepared and supported to excel in their role. Gallup's experience is that new employees typically take around 12 months to reach their full performance.
Keeping people matters too. LinkedIn's Workplace Learning Report 2024 found that 90% of organisations are concerned about employee retention, and that providing learning opportunities is their number one retention strategy.
None of that says video is the answer. It says the first weeks are often under-planned, and that anything which makes them clearer and more consistent is worth a look.
What research says about learning from video
The broadest evidence comes from university teaching, where video has been tested most. In 2021, Michael Noetel and colleagues published a systematic review in the Review of Educational Research covering 105 randomised studies with 7,776 students in total. They found:
- Swapping existing teaching for video led to small improvements in learning.
- Adding video to existing teaching led to strong improvements.
The authors note that the results may be affected by some experimental and publication bias, and students are not employees. But the direction is useful for onboarding: video works best as an addition to people, not as a replacement for them. A new starter who watched a two-minute walkthrough before meeting their buddy gets more out of that meeting.
The same Gallup article found that when managers take an active role in onboarding, employees are 3.4 times as likely to say their onboarding was exceptional. Videos can free managers from repeating the basics. They can't stand in for the manager.
Keep each video short, with one task in each
A 2014 study by Philip Guo, Juho Kim and Rob Rubin looked at 6.9 million video sessions on edX courses. As summarised by Cynthia Brame in CBE—Life Sciences Education (2016), the median viewer watched close to all of a video under six minutes long, but only about half of a 9 to 12 minute video. Brame's first guideline is simply to keep it short.
Richard Mayer's research on multimedia learning, reviewed in Educational Psychology Review in 2024, adds the segmenting principle: people learn better when a continuous lesson is broken into self-paced pieces. For onboarding, that means one video per task: "how to submit an expense", not "everything about finance".
Words and pictures, and nothing extra
Mayer's best-known finding is the multimedia principle: people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. A tool walkthrough that shows the screen while a short line explains each step does exactly that.
The flip side is what Brame calls weeding and Mayer calls coherence: remove anything that doesn't support the goal. Brame names music and busy backgrounds as examples that can get in the way. In training videos, keep music low or leave it out, and keep the screen clean so people know where to look. Signalling helps too: an arrow, a highlight or a short label on the part of the screen that matters.
Which onboarding topics suit video
A useful map comes from Talya Bauer's onboarding guide for the SHRM Foundation (2010), which describes the building blocks of onboarding as four Cs:
| Building block | What it covers | How well video fits |
|---|---|---|
| Compliance | Rules, policies, security basics | Good for a consistent first explanation. Keep the binding text in writing. |
| Clarification | How to do the job: tools, processes, where things are | The best fit. Short screen walkthroughs, one task each. |
| Culture | How the company works and decides | A short film can show it. It works best when leaders then talk about it in person. |
| Connection | Relationships with colleagues | Mostly a job for people: buddies, introductions, lunches. |
For software companies there is a bonus. New support, sales and success staff need to learn your own product quickly, and the short product videos you make for customers double as training for them.
Few companies do this yet
In Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing 2026, only 16% of video marketers said they make employee onboarding videos and 23% make training videos, against 68% making explainer videos. Internal video is still the exception, which makes it an easy place to improve on what most new starters get.
A simple plan for a first set
- Collect the questions. Ask the last three hires which questions they asked in their first two weeks. You will see the same five or six.
- One video per question. Most will be 30 seconds to two minutes. Anything longer is probably two topics.
- Show the real screens. Record or recreate the actual tools, with labels on the parts that matter.
- Put them where people already work. The intranet page, the onboarding checklist or the tool's own help panel.
- Pair each video with a person. "Watch this, then ask Jana" works better than either alone.
- Date them and update them. When a tool changes, the video changes. Short videos make that cheap.
What this means for you
- Use video to carry the repeatable part of onboarding and keep people for the rest. The research favours adding video to teaching, not replacing it.
- Keep each video to one task and well under six minutes. Shorter is easier to watch and cheaper to update.
- Show the real screens, label what matters and cut everything else, including loud music.
- Start with five videos answering the five questions every new hire asks.
For timing details, see how long a product video should be.
Sources
- Wetherell, E. and Nelson, B. (2021). 8 Practical Tips for Leaders for a Better Onboarding Process. Gallup. gallup.com/workplace/353096
- LinkedIn Learning (2024). Workplace Learning Report 2024. learning.linkedin.com/resources/workplace-learning-report-2024
- Noetel, M. et al. (2021). Video Improves Learning in Higher Education: A Systematic Review. Review of Educational Research 91(2), 204–236. doi.org/10.3102/0034654321990713. Summary: aera.net
- Brame, C. J. (2016). Effective Educational Videos: Principles and Guidelines for Maximizing Student Learning from Video Content. CBE—Life Sciences Education 15(4), es6. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5132380
- Mayer, R. E. (2024). The Past, Present, and Future of the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning. Educational Psychology Review 36, 8. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09842-1
- Bauer, T. N. (2010). Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success. SHRM Foundation. shrm.org (PDF)
- Wyzowl (2026). State of Video Marketing 2026. wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics