Qualcomm
Amplifying Global Training with On-Demand Video
Achievements
On-demand video for 8,000 learners
8-40 hours of content provided per class
Successfully scaling training for a global organization
The Challenge
Qualcomm Incorporated is one of the world’s leading semiconductor companies. Its technologies and services make up much of the foundation of the modern wireless telecommunications industry.
Qualcomm relies on the technical insights, intelligence, and innovations of more than 27,000 employees around the world. Innovation is at the heart of the company’s corporate culture, and a value the company relies on in order to maintain its place at the head of its market. Supporting that culture at Qualcomm is another closely-held principle: fostering employee learning and development.
Along with a litany of live in-classroom sessions, Qualcomm uses video to extend the availability of many of its training courses, making them available on-demand to its engineers, analysts, executives, and other members of the organization.
The benefits of on-demand video, however, were soon outweighed by the time and costs required to create it.
When Qualcomm first began creating video recordings of its training sessions, the company relied on an outside vendor to record and produce each video. Sessions were typically ready to share a week or two after the original presentation, and each added a new invoice against the team budget.
It quickly became clear that the way the company’s learning and development teams were using video simply couldn’t scale. And that problem, in turn, meant it would be very difficult for the rest of the teams’ initiatives to scale as well.
Collectively, the teams set about looking for a more efficient tool to deliver video for eLearning – and that’s when Qualcomm discovered Panopto.
The Solution
As Dana Sanderlin, Director of Product Management, recalls, “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.’”
“Panopto gives us a cost-effective tool to expand the way we do eLearning,” says Sanderlin. “With Panopto, we can record the one-, two-, and three-day classes, put them in a playlist section by section, and present both the video of the trainer and the slides side by side. We can update existing recordings whenever we need, and continually enhance our training library.”
Also important is Panopto’s ability to index and search every word spoken or shown on-screen in the training videos.
“For a technical subject, the ability to search the actual spoken and on-screen content becomes critical,” says Sanderlin. “When you’re in a training session that might last a day or even a week, the point isn’t really to remember — it’s to see how things work and learn where things are, and achieve an understanding along the way. Panopto helped us ensure our recordings would be resources our people could go back to, find the information they need, and get back to solving the task at hand.”
With Panopto, the technical aspects of video production and management are taken care of instantly without the additional time and cost of working with third-party AV specialists. Training teams just click “record” and present — Panopto takes care of the rest.
“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, Qualcomm
The Impact
Panopto is helping Qualcomm’s learning and development team reach offices around the world more efficiently. “In the past, when we recorded the video into our own internal video library, our people in India had to go through all of the different network hoops to try to get to that server from halfway around the world,” says Ken Davis, a Senior Learning Technology Specialist in the Corporate Learning Center. “It was buffering. It was slow. It wasn’t an ideal experience. Now with our installation of Panopto on the cloud, we’ve had people come back from India and say, ‘I don’t have to wait for 20 minutes for the video to start. It starts right away.’”
Along with improving accessibility, Qualcomm is using video to maintain the visual nature and interactivity of the classroom environment. “We’re looking from the perspective of the engineers who want to see and interact with the person that’s teaching the program,” says Davis. “That’s especially important in our remote offices — they want to know that someone here in the home office is there to walk them through the information. On-demand video has been a key part of that, especially in Europe and Asia, where eLearning is already culturally a part of how people expect to be taught.”
