CREATING ENGAGING CONTENT FOR EMPLOYEE TRAINING

At Hong Kong airlines, a team of 400 pilots are supported by the company’s Continuous Engagement Alignment & Growth (CEAG) program, which supplies year-round instruction from the in-house team of veteran airline trainers.

Stelios Goules is one of those trainers. The previous Hong Kong Airlines training curriculum was based on a series of lectures, which Goules calls a static, deductive, unengaging way of doing things. After searching for alternatives to the traditional teaching methods, Goules hit upon a new way to bring the airline’s training courses to life: animated videos.

Animations help us facilitate learning because you’re able to get [the students] to reflect, you’re able to get them to relate, you’re able to get them to interact.

Goules discovered Plotagon Studio, which enabled him to turn his lectures into animated video scenarios by himself, even though he possessed no animation experience of his own. This easy process also meant that he could update the lessons as needed without having to rely on a professional animator or outside vendor.

Students of all ages enjoy the new animated solution, from millennials recently out of flight school to seasoned pilots in their sixties. Goules recalls teaching a course recently using a combination of slides along with the animated videos. In the room was a seventy year-old instructor.

He was from Taiwan, and he loved it. He just thought it was so funny to see these cartoons and see some of them make mistakes and talk to each other, and they can relate to it.

The informal nature of the animated movies helps the students digest the serious information that they contain. Some videos have a little bit of humor, some have more wisdom, but within the context of putting it into the real learning pieces. It lends itself really well. So, it’s great to have it, because it just brings out life in what you’re trying to achieve.

The Plotagon animated videos have been so successful that Goules and his colleagues have been incorporating animated characters elsewhere in their training materials and internal communications. The training directors have even replaced their weekly written message to the pilots with animated versions of themselves seated at Plotagon’s animated news desk, where they deliver two- to three-minute broadcasts with updates.

It puts a little bit of the fun to what we want to transfer across, and actually people listen to it rather than just reading though a dull message.