E-learning is a growing part of a professional voiceover’s repertoire.  Siobhan Wells from Skillsoft has been using Piehole to source voices recently and she kindly agreed to answer a few questions about e-learning, what makes for a good VO and how to prepare yourself to get more of this type of work.

What is ‘e-learning’?

e-learning is learning (training) presented electronically rather than in person or in a classroom.

What type of customers does Skillsoft have?

Our typical customers are employees of medium to large corporations (main market is the US) who have access to sections of the SkillSoft library of Business Skills and IT courseware relevant to their jobs and business.

Can you give an example of a typical piece of work to be produced?

Here are a few paragraphs from an Ms Office course:

Conversations, a new feature in Outlook 2010, is an automatic grouping of a string of messages, consisting of an initial e-mail and its subsequent responses. A conversation is indicated by a small white arrow to the left of the original e-mail’s subject line. You can click this arrow to expand the conversation thread. Clicking the arrow again will collapse the thread.

You can manage conversations in various ways. You can ignore a conversation thread using the Ignore button on the Home tab.

This means the conversation is moved to the Deleted folder, and all future replies to the message will not be sent to you.

You can also file away conversations by using the Move button to move them to a different folder.

What would be your ideal voiceover to work with?

Someone who also has the ability to read an unseen script with minimal re-takes and sound completely natural - like they just are having a conversation.

Do you there will be more e-learning work to be produced in the coming years?

Yes, but whether any work we have will be for American or other accents is hard to tell. At the moment the bulk of our work is for American voiceovers, but there has been a growing trend towards using non-American, English-speaking VO’s . (I should note though, that we have enough VOs on our books for current requirements.)

Do you prefer to work with someone in studio, or online?

We do both. For remote VO’s once their technical setup is of a high enough standard and we can listen in to sessions as required, that’s fine with us.

Do you have a favorite voiceover to work with?

Now that would be telling J

How can our voiceovers best market themselves to get more e-learning VO work?

Include e-learning as part of your demo, but without a backing track.