Talks about: #tech #uqualio #lms #futureready #saas #elearning #videolearning #ed-tech & #trainig
Hatla Færch Johnsen, CEO & Co-founder at uQualio | Tech | Learning Management System | SaaS | Ed-tech | e-learning
Rapid Fire Round with
Hatla Færch Johnsen
Motivation behind uQualio
Her Learning Journey
You have 10 years of experience in consulting in IT, Pharma, Production, Biotech, nutraceuticals, and fine chemicals with a particular strength of business development strategies. if we combine the experience, you almost have 2 decades, which is 18 years of experience in this field. Half a decade of experience in project management, I think, the combination of both expert knowledge and management experience gave you a push to leap to open your business. What did and why did the coach in you tell you to make a platform such as Uqualio? Tell us about your journey?
You have 10 years of experience in consulting in IT, Pharma, Production, Biotech, nutraceuticals, and fine chemicals with a particular strength of business development strategies. if we combine the experience, you almost have 2 decades, which is 18 years of experience in this field. Half a decade of experience in project management, I think, the combination of both expert knowledge and management experience gave you a push to leap to open your business. What did and why did the coach in you tell you to make a platform such as Uqualio? Tell us about your journey?
The simple answer to this question is that this is something that is what I needed when it is wasn’t there. One of the things you do sometimes when you work in other people’s companies, you see things that are missing and we discover that. I did intern on communication in IBM and on Friday’s every two weeks management sent out an email to anybody telling what was happening and it was about the merger after they bought PWC consulting and what happened was that they said we sent out an email to intel communications never they knew the people who saw the email and understood the content. And as everybody was consultant, the worst part was one day when we were moving offices and email communication went out explaining that we are not moving and everybody has to move their things into boxes because one day they would come and move them to another office and it turns out quite a few weren’t reading their email. With the result that, few boxes have not been moved and the table were uncleansed. So, imagine if we had a system where the email is sent out but with a video, with the CEO or the management explaining what it was you are needed to do after they sent it out they would have known that people saw the video. That would have been brilliant.
Then I went, and I was appointed as an executive assistant of the vice president running the pharmaceuticals production and we also had a lot of communication going out on strategy, core things and we never knew that people participated or didn’t participate or they understood weather they had to do the thing differently as part of being in management is a change management task of moving people from one section to another and not knowing if people ever so understood what you were saying gave quite a lot of problems though I could have used these platforms like what we do now. My partner worked in software and he could have used the platform too. He working with software what often happens is that when you onboard a software developer, it is the available person that onboards the next one but very often the one that has the most time is not necessarily the best one.
So, very often what happens is you start with one person who knows exactly what they doing and then they teach somebody else and the next to teach somebody else what to do and so on. And then they record the first person who know what exactly they were doing they would make sure that what the next one will be doing will exactly the right thing is important what the next one remember. So, and then when you look at a lot of LMS they are relatively complex and it takes a lot of skills and knowledge.
In software when you train people is important that the person training knows the things. And if that person is busy, then why should not record it making e-learning not be complicated because what is normally said that a picture says a lot more than 1000 words honestly a video because one min video which has so many pictures and can have more the 3 million words trying to write down what people are supposed to do why don’t you show them. Nowadays, the smartphones that we have making a recording is super easy. That is why we thought why don’t we make an e-learning platform. So, on our e-learning platform, everything you can do is based on a video on a course. You have to have a video to make a course you can add documentaries, fact sheets or manuals. But it is the video that guides what the content is about which means that you can make content about anything. We have customers using the platform teaching retail system what their product does and how they work. We got people using it to support how you can do simple things and other people using it for the service part of it boarding up new employees all kinds of things because it is the video that decides the content. And we added a quiz layer to the video part because people like to test their recently gained knowledge and secondly the more time you repeat the knowledge that you got the better people to remember and one of the things is that you have to beat the forgetting curve. If new knowledge is not repeated again and again by seeing the video first answer the question about it making sure that the newly gained knowledge is in your hand for you to remember and at the end after seeing all the videos you take a final test, that test can give you a badge and that badge can be shared on the social media.
Is Ed-tech winner-take-all market segment?
Talking about Ed-tech platforms
Ed-tech is the buzzword these days. Especially, in the initial to the mid-phase of the pandemic until now, ed tech has skyrocketed. With e-learning becoming the new norm and with COVID-19 accelerating innovation like never before, has education become a winner-take-all market?
Ed-tech is the buzzword these days. Especially, in the initial to the mid-phase of the pandemic until now, ed tech has skyrocketed. With e-learning becoming the new norm and with COVID-19 accelerating innovation like never before, has education become a winner-take-all market?
I think the market for ed-tech is, of course, rising because everybody realizes that we can’t travel much as we did and going forward nobody will ever go again, why would you go to the shops and train for a product or anything if you can just put a video on it and then train them directly. It just does not make any sense and it is a waste of people’s time and at the same time if I go to the shop and you are not there for any reason that means that I have to go to the shop again to train you instead of you put on a video and show everyone which becomes so much easier.
The second thing that I also think that advantage of the pandemic appeared is that realized that some of the old methods that we used to work are now outdated. A classroom, in general, takes 45 mins to complete and it is also true the brain cannot remain focused for straight 45 mins. So, breaking things down into small bites what one can call is bite-size learning which is super important because that makes for the brain easier to learn. So, a lot of these technologies is acknowledged because of the pandemic and have been able to discover ways to do new things. And that’s very lucky and hopefully, our world can become even better with this. Sometimes when you run in a spinning wheel you continue to do the same thing again and again.
Comparison between Indian & European Ed Tech market
Right Product Fit For
Ed-tech
Certainly in a crisis like this, education companies are booming. How would you compare the Indian and Danish markets for education and how EdTech companies astutely figure out their product-market fit?
Certainly in a crisis like this, education companies are booming. How would you compare the Indian and Danish markets for education and how EdTech companies astutely figure out their product-market fit?
Scandinavia in Denmark, has a very strong learning and school tradition and I think one of the things in this Scandinavian way is relatively democratic. So, in quite a few schools where you are taught how to learn things you learn how to recite things in the Danish school, it is a little bit different is more based on the training you get knowledge yourself. It is more about the methods of learning than it is the content.
On our platform, you are the specialist and know-how to do the things when you think only specialists can be taught how to do the things. Than everybody should be a part of that education the reason why, what we did was based on the fact that people know the importance of everybody being educated was very relevant and we are seeing that today the FN target for how to improve the world is to make sure that everybody is educated enough.
Is Ed-tech just a bubble?
Ed-tech Future in the Eco System
So, in the 1990s, people were discovering the internet, lots of internet companies were happening, valuation of these companies became high and boom suddenly the bubble burst and there was a big drop in the stock market, with the capital going in the ed-tech space, do you think people might make losses? Do you fear it?
So, in the 1990s, people were discovering the internet, lots of internet companies were happening, valuation of these companies became high and boom suddenly the bubble burst and there was a big drop in the stock market, with the capital going in the ed-tech space, do you think people might make losses? Do you fear it?
I think that there will be bubbles around but for ed-tech, I don’t think that’s gonna happen. The reason why the more educated people we have the more they think that they are responsible for their lives and they know how to be happy and satisfied. And this is the very primary way to make sure that fundamentals of society are working and now we have means to educate the world which further means that ed-tech is going to stay. There are industries like ed-tech that are booming, yes as a fact it cannot be the supplement of the classroom and the contact between the teacher and the student. I mean but you need not meet up for a revision or something you can do that in a video training.
And then you take questions and answer, practice using the classroom training as well and generate far more knowledge that means the students can be trained at home. So, it is changing the way we do things and I hope that it will change and bring more good.
In the beginning, ed-tech was only used as a training platform, but now people are smarter, what it can be used for and what it can’t be used for. Now, all we just need to do is to make it more structured so that we can make the maximum benefit out of it the repetitive work. Having one teacher in every classroom explaining the same thing make sense but it will be great if one teacher explains through a video and spread it to many more than in the classroom.
How sustainable is the SaaS model?
Journey of uQualio in the SaaS Marketplace
Let's talk about your product and its base, Uqualio is based on Saas technology, it is strangely an old concept making its trend back into the market place, SaaS seems to have taken on the massive unprecedented growth we've seen through this pandemic. How sustainable do you think this growth is, post the pandemic?
Let's talk about your product and its base, Uqualio is based on Saas technology, it is strangely an old concept making its trend back into the market place, SaaS seems to have taken on the massive unprecedented growth we've seen through this pandemic. How sustainable do you think this growth is, post the pandemic?
Yes, it is sustainable, lot of people especially in the pandemic, a software subscription as a service a lot more affordable instead of taking a license from the start. Having to pay for huge amount on a legacy LMS system many people don’t have the funding where with subscription service the monthly level is much lower. So, yes it is here to stay.
That is why we made it easier for the user to actually pay for its actual activation rather than to be trapped in lower long paying chain. It is much less expensive than buying a licenses of especially for the smaller companies and that’s one of the things that we have decided to target. The things to make it easy to use and less complex and it is as easy as if you know how to film the knowledge that you have and can share it with your customers or employees.
How's your experience leading a company in a male-dominated world?
Women Leading a Tech Company
What's it like to be a CEO of a company, in a male dominated industry?
What's it like to be a CEO of a company, in a male dominated industry?
It is fun right now there are a lot of focus on female CEO founders. Being a tech startup and making sure that everybody knows this and getting media attention is very useful. More often the tech solutions are based on engineers making software based on ways of working but very often they lack in the ability of how to communicate is a little less and
we know this from our company where the engineering part and the communication part front which I represent and then we actually need each other to make it easy to understand about what is it that we are doing. And the complexity of level rises with the IT developers, so being a female tech founder communication perspective actually really helps. I actually try to make it easy in making people understanding about our platform is.
Underlying Technology of uQualio
And what are the underlying technologies you are using in your software?
And what are the underlying technologies you are using in your software?
Yes, we are club base specifically Amazon club base which means that we can scale of any size on people needs. And then we have a responsive platform that we built ourselves on Angela.
Views about AnyTechTrial.Com
Thoughts about "AnyTechTrial.Com"
We would love to hear your views about us “AnyTechTrial.Com”
We would love to hear your views about us “AnyTechTrial.Com”
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