How Paragon Skills trains 1000s of apprentices with video

We spoke with Lynsey Carragher, Digital Content Manager at Paragon Skills, part of the Knovia group. Paragon Skills uses Synthesia to produce videos for e-learning modules designed for apprentices.

90%

Course satisfaction rates

95%

Cost savings

70%

Faster video creation

Paragon Skills is a leading national training provider that has been delivering first-class apprenticeship programs across various sectors for over 20 years. These sectors include Adult Care, Early Years, Professional Services and many more.

Industry
Education
Headquarters
UK
Company size
Mid-Market: 100 - 1k

Industry Context

Education providers need to offer scalable, engaging training across programs and sectors. Vendor-produced videos are too expensive and hard to update to meet evolving learner needs.

The Challenge

Lynsey and her team have been working on a project to redesign the curriculum for apprentices across multiple sectors. These online training programs can span from 12 to 24 months and complement what apprentices learn at the workplace.

Redesigning the Apprenticeship curriculum requires a lot of work, especially when the goal is to improve the content quality. While working with an external video production provider, the team quickly realised that scaling the redesign project was very tricky.

Costly: Creating videos with third-party providers is expensive, and every amendment adds to the cost.
Time-consuming: Video creation took a long time, preventing the team from working on other priority projects.
Lack of flexibility: Small updates required extra time and resources to recreate the videos.

Working with an external video provider was very expensive and time-consuming. Even the smallest amendment would take a long time. We wanted full control over our video content.

Lynsey Carragher, Digital Content Manager

The Solution

Using Synthesia, the team can now move faster and has more flexibility to create high-quality videos. Here’s how they do it:

The team designs the e-learning module and decides which sections will be in video format. They draft a video script, insert it into Synthesia, design the scenes using their custom brand template, and voilà – The video is ready to be embedded in Articulate Rise and Storyline.

This is what the team appreciates most about Synthesia:

Multiple avatars: Lynsey and her team can create small interaction scenarios by placing multiple avatars in scenes to illustrate real-life interactions that are engaging to watch.
Editing flexibility: With Synthesia, the team can easily update existing content and quickly respond to legislation changes or general improvement updates.
Custom templates: Paragon Skills has a custom-made brand template that is consistent with their color palette, style, and shapes. This makes it easy to create high-quality content quickly.

Since using Synthesia, we have more bandwidth and can take on many other projects. It has made us much more efficient.

Lynsey Carragher, Digital Content Manager

The Results

With Synthesia, Lynsey has seen massive efficiency gains, and high-quality video content in the learning modules has also improved the apprentices' performance:

High course satisfaction rates: 90% of learners are very satisfied with the courses’ e-learning modules, which reflects the engaging nature of video.
Cost savings: Transitioning from external video production to Synthesia resulted in a 95% reduction in costs, from £850 to approximately £40 per video.
Faster video production: By moving video production in-house with Synthesia, the team reduced video creation time by 70%.