When people think about getting training or going to classes, the classic way of doing so is to go in person to a teacher or classroom where they can give you sed training. However, nowadays many educational companies and brands are offering not just online classes but prerecorded training videos.

Whilst this is suitable for some skills, it is obviously not practical for all. Therefore what we need to establish and confirm is whether training videos are a good or bad idea for speaker training. In other words, if you are looking to become a better public speaker, should you us speaker training videos?

Lets see.

Virtual speaking skills

Whether you are talking over the phone on facetime or on zoom we use a lot of the same speech techniques and improvement methods. Whether we are talking about modulation, posture, warmth and feeling or pronunciation, all of these things can be learned virtually just as well as they can in person.

Most of your speaking skills are verbal and audible meaning that if you can listen to a video and practice it yourself afterwards, you are getting the same benefits that you would get in person. You do need to make sure however that the speaker training videos give a clear shot of the speakers facial expressions, standing positions and hand movements however as this will all complement the main skills that you will be learning along the way.

In person speaking skills

Some things need to be learned in person. For example, carpentry is a practical skill that requires muscle memory and hands on practice. Public speaking however is mostly about your voice projection, tone and mannerisms which can all be worked on at home and can all be shown to you via a video.

The only things missing from video training is going to be stage presence which honestly can only be practiced when you are actually on a stage speaking live and mic positioning. However, the later though an essential skill for public speakers is actually quite simple to learn.

Once you know the angle and distance, you can practice this at home as you go over your speech, and though you dont have someone to show you physically, if you follow the instructions you wont have any trouble.