How long should a training video be?

Most training videos are as long as the person explaining needed them to be. Nobody chose the length. It just happened.

There is real research on this, and it points to a short answer. It also comes with a few caveats worth knowing before you cut anything.

What the research found

A widely cited study on this is from 2014. Philip Guo, Juho Kim and Rob Rubin looked at 6.9 million video watching sessions across four online courses on edX and measured how long people actually watched.

Median engagement time was at most six minutes, no matter how long the video was. On videos longer than nine minutes, viewers often made it less than halfway through.

Their recommendation was blunt. Segment videos into short chunks, ideally less than six minutes.

They noted something else that matters for plants. Even well produced recordings of classroom lectures may not make engaging video. Shorter videos and informal talking head videos held attention better. Filming last year's classroom session and calling it a training video is close to what they warned against.

Where six minutes does not fit

Be careful with that number.

Those viewers chose to be there. They were online course students who could close the tab. Your operators are assigned the video, which keeps them in the room but does not keep them watching.

Watching is not learning. The authors said so themselves. They warned against drawing conclusions about learning from engagement alone, and described engagement as often a prerequisite for learning, not proof of it.

Some tasks take longer than six minutes. A full changeover does. The answer is not to cut steps. It is to cut the video into pieces.

That last point has its own research. A 2019 review in Educational Psychology Review by Günter Daniel Rey and colleagues pooled 56 investigations with 88 comparisons on segmenting, which means breaking instruction into smaller pieces. Segmenting produced small to medium gains in what people remembered and how well they applied it, and it lowered mental load. It also made learning take longer, which is a fair trade for a task people have to get right.

A working rule for plant training

One task, one video. If you need two verbs to title it, it is probably two videos.

Under six minutes for anything someone watches start to finish. We put it this way in our post on safety training video for plants and job sites: a four minute module on one topic beats a thirty minute module on eight.

A minute or two for reference clips. Those are the ones someone pulls up at the machine in the middle of a task.

Chapters for anything long. A changeover becomes a set of short videos numbered in order, so a new hire can watch step three again without scrubbing through steps one and two.

What short looks like in practice

When we made an unboxing and setup video for The Flame Detector, a fire safety product, it covered everything from opening the box to the device confirming it was connected. Three AA batteries, a magnetic bracket, an app. Three minutes, start to finish.

That is really a work instruction for customers. The task is short, so the video is short, and that was the point. It answers the quiet worry that setup will turn into a project.

Short is mostly an editing decision. For JD Paint Pros, we filmed two days of a twelve day job in a 50,000 square foot former machine shop. The finished video runs under two minutes, short on purpose.

Training works the same way. Film the whole task, then decide what each piece needs and cut everything else.

How to cut a long one down

Cut the opening. No logo, no welcome, no agenda. Start on the task.

Move the policy to paper. Rules, definitions and numbers belong in a handout or the SOP. The video shows what they look like.

Split by step. Every place the narrator says next is a candidate for a new video.

Watch it with a new hire. Note the moment they look away. That is usually where the video should have ended.

If the footage already exists, most of this is an editing job, not a reshoot. More on our video editing services.