Ask an L&D team how their training content is performing, and the conversation usually centres on output. Modules built. Guides written. Documentation published.
Ask how much of it gets read, and the conversation tends to go quiet.
The stat nobody in L&D wants to talk about
Training documentation has a completion problem. Completion rates for long-form training documents, onboarding guides, compliance manuals, process walkthroughs, consistently fall below 20% at most organisations. For longer, unstructured documents, the number drops further.
That means an L&D team can spend three months building a 50-page onboarding guide, and the average new hire will read two and a half pages.
This is not an indictment of L&D teams. Most training documentation is thorough, accurate, and carefully structured. The problem is not the content. The format is not carrying it.
Why documentation became the default
Text-based training became the default for a practical reason: producing a quality training video was too expensive and slow for most teams to justify.
For most of corporate training history, video required a production team, a studio, professional equipment, and post-production work that could stretch timelines by weeks. For a mid-sized L&D team with a limited budget, that infrastructure wasn’t available.
So teams built the best document-based training they could. They added structure, summaries, callout boxes, and visual breaks. They worked with what they had.
The format wasn’t a strategic choice. It was a constraint.
That constraint no longer exists
The economics of video production changed in the last few years. AI-assisted tools cut the time from script to finished video from weeks to hours. What once required a production budget is now accessible to a single person with a laptop.
The bottleneck is gone. For many L&D teams, the workflow hasn’t caught up yet. Documentation is still the default, even when it no longer has to be.
Kristin Broadhead, Director of Learning & Development at Sonesta Hotels, reduced video production costs by 80% after shifting her team’s process. “The ease of content update and cost savings are remarkable,” she said. The barrier to switching wasn’t capability. It was habit.
What high-performing L&D teams do differently
The teams seeing the best results in training engagement share a few practices.
They default to video for anything with a learning objective. If someone needs to understand how to do something, or why something matters, video is the starting point. Documents come later, as reference material.
They keep training videos short and focused. A single video covering one topic consistently outperforms a longer video covering five. The format works best when it respects the learner’s attention.
They treat documentation as support material, not the main event. Policies, technical specs, and reference guides stay in text. Learning content, the kind that requires someone to absorb and apply information, moves to video.
Carmine Valente, VP of Information Security at Paramount, replaced an average of ten hours of walkthrough meetings per month by producing training videos instead. The documentation didn’t disappear. It just stopped being the primary way knowledge got transferred.
When docs still work (and when they don’t)
Documents aren’t going away. There are specific situations where text outperforms video, and converting everything without a reason creates different problems.
Keep as a document:
- Reference material that employees search rather than read linearly
- Policies and procedures that need to be cited or quoted
- Technical specifications that require precise scanning
- Step-by-step instructions that employees follow while actively working
Better as video:
- Onboarding content with a clear narrative
- Compliance training that needs to be completed and confirmed
- Product or software training where watching the process helps
- Any content with a learning objective and an expected outcome
Most effective training programmes use both. The problem most teams have is over-relying on documents for content where the format genuinely matters.
A practical starting point
If you have a training document that isn’t getting engagement, start with one question: does this have a learning objective?
If yes, if there’s something the learner is expected to understand or be able to do, video is likely the better format. If the content is reference material, it probably belongs as a document. Make it searchable, keep it updated, and accept that it will be consulted rather than read.
The teams getting results aren’t producing more content. They’re producing the right content in the right format.
Turn your training docs into videos people actually finish
Colossyan is an AI platform for training and enablement. Teams at Paramount, Ericsson, Cisco, Johnson and Johnson, and UPS use Colossyan to create training videos from existing content.
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