At Qualcomm, invention is at the heart of corporate culture — a value the company relies on in order to maintain its place atop the mobile technology industry.

Facilitating that culture is another closely-held principle: strong support for employee learning and development.

For Qualcomm employees, partners, and contractors, the company’s commitment to continuous learning is readily apparent in the volume of training options the company offers. Qualcomm’s learning and development teams facilitate more than 600 instructor-led training events annually, as well as a nearly endless stream of informal knowledge sharing sessions, guru talks, and brown bag discussions.

Searching for Lower-Cost, More Scalable Training

Supporting its litany of live in-classroom sessions, Qualcomm uses video to expand the availability of many of its training courses, making most courses viewable on-demand for engineers, analysts, executives, and other members of the organization.

At first, Qualcomm relied on a vendor to produce its training videos, but it quickly became apparent that model wasn’t scalable. Recordings took weeks to produce, and each new session added yet another invoice against the budget. In addition, Qualcomm couldn’t offer technical enhancements to the videos like more reliable streaming, peer-to-peer sharing, or inside-video search to make the final products more user-friendly.

Collectively, Qualcomm’s learning and development teams went looking for a more efficient tool to deliver video for eLearning. That’s when they discovered Panopto.

“When I first found Panopto, I thought ‘Wow, we could create all this video ourselves, and it would be easy. This could open up our world.’” Dana Sanderlin, Director of Product Management

Capturing Complex Technical Training with Panopto

Engineers at Qualcomm are expected to be experts on the 3G and 4G wireless standards. With that knowledge, these engineers are charged with supporting wireless operators and mobile device OEMs around the world and ensuring that their networks and devices are optimized to perform at their best.

Every year, the Qualcomm Wireless Academy trains more than 8,000 students on 30 subjects related to 3G and 4G. Many courses take two to three full days or more and revolve around dense technical handbooks. It’s a lot to take in all at once, which is why Qualcomm records many sessions.

“For the highly technical training we’re providing in the Wireless Academy, our engineers want all the details — as much as we can give them,” said Dana Sanderlin, Director of Product Management at Qualcomm. “With Panopto, we can capture every session, organize each recording into playlists, and present both the video of the trainer and the slides side by side. And we can update existing recordings whenever we need, and continually enhance our training library.”

Panopto’s video search capabilities have also proven valuable. “For a technical subject, the ability to search the actual spoken or shown on-screen content in a video like Panopto can is critical,” notes Sanderlin. “When you’re in a training session that might last a day or even a week, the point isn’t to remember — it’s to see how things work and achieve an understanding along the way. Panopto helped us ensure our recordings would be resources our people could go back to, instantly find the information they need, and get back to the solving the task at hand.”

 

 

Click for a to see a sample recording kicking off Qualcomm’s Smart Cities initiative.

 

Expanding Global Learning & Development with On-Demand Video

“We wanted to make more use of more content,” recalls Ken Davis, Senior Learning Technology Specialist in Qualcomm’s Corporate Learning Center.”We have hundreds of instructor-led events each year, including technical, professional, and management classes. But there were other opportunities not being recorded — things like guru talks, knowledge sharing sessions, and brown bag sessions. We knew there was a wealth of information being presented in those environments, and we wanted to make it available for everyone.  Now we can and we do.”

That started with getting the right employee training tools in place. With Panopto, it’s easy for the Qualcomm team to record just about anything. “Now we just have the presenter come in with their presentation on their computer, sharing whatever they like on their screen,” said Davis. “We have a separate computer that records audio and video. With Panopto we record both of those into a single session, and then from that, we get a really nice presentation we can index and make available in minutes.”

That newfound flexibility allows Qualcomm’s learning and development teams to provide more training materials and informational resources for the company’s worldwide workforce. “We have a significant number of employees in international offices,” notes Davis. “Relying only on instructor-led training has become an expensive proposition. We see it being wiser to simply hold a session once and use Panopto to simultaneously stream a live broadcast of the class for those who can attend in real-time, as well as capture a recording of the event we can make available for others to watch on-demand.”

Looking To The Future — Social Learning with Video

As Qualcomm’s learning and development teams continue to expand support for formal and informal training activities all around the world, they’ve also set their sights on another key trend in employee training — education through social learning and collaboration.

“Today our employee relations and communication groups are leveraging more and more Panopto presentations to enable that kind of social knowledge sharing to happen,” says Davis. “And the reason for that is because of the unique capture capability that Panopto has to capture what’s on your screen, along with additional video from additional cameras, and bring it all together and make it easy to search and share.”

“In the future, I’d like to get to a point where everyone at Qualcomm can use Panopto for collaboration,” says Sanderlin. “Collaboration between everyone on our team is so important for us to remaining a technology leader. Our engineers learn so much from each other — already it’s a very powerful force for innovation. Tapping into that and scaling it with Panopto could help us foster an even more collaborative environment, where everyone at Qualcomm can really exchange ideas and insights, learn from one another’s expertise, and share the intelligence we have that will help us keep on innovating.”

Find out more!

Download your copy of the Qualcomm Panopto case study today to learn how the world leader in mobile technologies is expanding its global learning and development programs with on-demand video, powered by the Panopto enterprise video platform.