Awesomely Bad Training Videos
Yay! It’s training video time! Your boss brings you into a room with a TV and a VCR. You’re so excited because you get to take a little break from your everyday routine and watch a video. You never get to watch videos at work. This is practically a day-cation without leaving the office. The only thing missing is the popcorn. You’re given a few pieces of paper but you don’t care cause the movie is about to start. Your boss presses play, turns out the lights, and leaves the room the way the dentist’s assistant hides behind a concrete wall before they zap you with X-ray radiation. With a few flickers of static fuzz, the tape catches speed and it begins.
All of a sudden, you remember why watching this video is mandatory: it’s so bad no one would watch it voluntarily. In an instant you flash back to every painful employee training video and awkward personal hygiene filmstrip that you’ve ever been forced to watch. You begin to panic. As the cheesy ‘Beverly Hills Cop’-inspired, synthesized soundtrack revs up, you look for a way out, but you can’t leave now. Your boss is out there. Maybe you could just day dream until it’s all over or even take a nap—but no. Those papers you were given are a quiz about the video! Granted the questions are so easy you could probably answer them without watching the video, but who knows? Maybe your boss is looking for specific answers taken from the stiff dialogue of these community theater rejects. It’s unavoidable. You walked right into their trap and now you’re going to have to… pay attention!
Unfortunately, there isn’t much we can say that will help you avoid bad training videos. They can happen to anyone. National RTAP does its part by producing training videos that are worth watching. Our team works very hard to make our videos educational and interesting. That’s not always an easy balance to meet. Training videos are most frequently criticized for either being too dry or too silly. Severely outdated styles can draw an easy chuckle too. But sometimes, like a classic B movie, it’s when they go wrong that they feel so right.
Let this blog provide a forum for the training videos that we love to loathe. Have you seen videos with hair styles and clothes that haven’t been seen in public since the Nixon administration, or acting so poor you’d think Ed Wood was behind the camera? Tell us about the worst training videos you’ve ever seen and why they’ve endeared themselves to your heart.
Better yet, check out some of the RTAP training videos (we’ll send them to you for free) and let us know what you think. Be honest. You won’t hurt our feelings. That’s the only way we can make them better. Besides, you just might find one so awesomely bad that you’ll have to add it to your personal guilty pleasure movie collection – you know, right between ‘Killer Klowns From Outer Space’ and ‘Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo’ – or maybe that’s just me.
