| Interviews |
| “The biggest challenge right now is finding the right way to deliver quick bites of learning to our learners without making it cumbersome for them to access the information” |
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What aspects of the congress are you most looking forward to? Riaz Uddin: I’m looking forward to discussing real life case studies with my peers. I think it’s important to understand the trials and errors of various projects that we’ve all implemented within our organizations. Let’s all learn from each other and see if we can help some folks accelerate a Project that they have been working on or even cancel a project that might not provide the ROI that they are looking for.
Verizon Wireless has invested heavily in learning innovation. How would you like to see the learning function as a whole renew itself? I think it will be important for us to move quickly when it comes to implementing new innovative ideas within an organization. Our users want information fast. We just need to get creative with how we hide the medicine and give them the information they need while still sneaking in a little bit of learning. We need to remember that one size does not fit all.
Where do you see the biggest challenges facing organizations as they look to improve workforce engagement in e-learning programs?
What advice would you give to companies looking to revamp their learning and development strategy? My advice would be to look into creating an innovation team. These are the folks that you allow to try new things within your organization. It’s okay for them to create quick proof of concepts for you to trial and it’s okay for them to fail fast. I think having a dedicated innovation team allows companies to take small risks and make incremental progress.
In your opinion, why is it important for the industry to attend this congress on June 22–23, 2015? I think it’s important because our industry is changing rapidly. We’re all being asked to do more with less. It’s great to discuss best practices with each other and see if we can all walk away with some nugget of information that will help us in our own organizations.
What has been your career highlight in the learning industry? My career highlight has been around moving from e-learning online courses to managing performance support systems. I’m really enjoying uncoupling myself from the LMS and looking for ways to get information to our learners the best way possible. My main focus is to make sure our users can search for the information they need so they can help our customers.
People are very excited to hear your joint presentation on examining the pros and cons of developing in-house learning solutions; can you give a brief introduction of the main aspects of your talk? Our goal is to highlight how we purchased an off the shelf solution for our content authors so they can develop more efficiently. We then realized that an off the shelf solution would not work for our developers and we needed to build our own custom development tool. We will also discuss the challenges we faced and are facing with building our own solution.
Finally, what 3 items are always on your desk/mobile workstation? I have Evernote, Microsoft OneNote and MindJet MindManager. I can’t remember everything so it’s great for me to use these note taking tools so I can also pull up the information I need when I need it. The mind mapping software is something I always use when I’m stuck on a problem and need something to help me brainstorm some solutions.
Junio 2015
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Riaz Uddin, Associate Director Learning Technologies & Content Systems at Verizon Wireless, analyzes his participation in 
I think the biggest challenge right now is finding the right way to deliver quick bites of learning to our learners without making it cumbersome for them to access the information. For example, you can’t have the learner constantly log into an LMS or log into various systems so they can just watch a video or play a game. Everything we do needs to be quick and easy for the learner so they can get in and get out with the information they need to do their jobs.