Huge thanks to Marc Guss and his guest tonight on the Marc Guss Voiceover Club, Christi Bowen! Christi is a voice actor and coach, and the founder of Tennessee Voiceover Studios. Tonight she talked all things eLearning with the Clubhouse audience.
After a start in producing commercials when she worked in college radio, Christi moved into video production before deciding to try voiceover. She says that her background in video production helps her visualize a script — when she reads it she imagines how she would shoot it. Not having any background in video production myself, I found this to be a really insightful way to analyze a script!
Christi said that she didn’t think about eLearning work when she first started in VO, but after developing a relationship with a client and working on an eLearning project, she pursued it, studied up, and did her research. Her business then grew through referrals from clients, and she said that eLearning is relationship dependent and that content creators tend to take you with them if they move to a different company.
So who are the buyers in eLearning? Christi provided this list of job titles to watch for when marketing or making connections:
- instructional designer (the most relevant)
- content creator
- instructional developer
- eLearning developer
- talent development
- learning designer
- learning and development specialist, or L&D specialist
- human resources manager
- story designer (sometimes)
Marc and Christi agreed that LinkedIn is a fantastic place to be for eLearning. Twitter is also a great place to connect, said Christi, and that instructional designers like to share content and compare notes there. They discuss things like how do people learn, teaching different age groups, how long something should be, etc. Christi said they are very interesting to observe because they have one foot in the business world and one foot in the creative world to create the modules. She used the examples of designers understanding which photos are best to use, color theory, and using space in order to create the most effective learning environment.
Some trends and topics that were brought up tonight:
Project length: the length of projects is getting smaller, said Christi. It’s moving away from the standard of an hour-long seat time (a person sitting for an hour for a module) and they are starting to break things down into smaller chunks. Not always, but it’s an overall trend.
AI voices: Christi said that she has lost work to AI voices, but her hope is that companies who have switched to synthetic voices will come back to human voices because their users won’t find it effective. If people aren’t learning and aren’t satisfied with the quality, there’s hope that that trend will reverse back to hiring VO artists.
Social Media: Christi discussed the importance of being engaging on social media while remaining professional, and to to supply content that others might feel useful. Even though a lot of eLearning is business-to-business and not public-facing, the companies hiring you “want to know that they’re working with a professional.” Marc said that Christi’s advice “follows all the rules of social media: engagement, being interesting, providing value, and thinking about your audience.”
Keep in touch with Tennessee Voiceover Studio’s newsletter for information about two upcoming services: eLearning demo production and eLearning classes.
Thanks so much to Marc and Christi for the amazing conversation, and for the insightful audience questions that furthered the discussion! Check out the Marc Guss Voiceover Club every Wednesday night on Clubhouse at 8:30 pm ET or catch the replay later.