A VERI good 48 hours in Lisbon

An opportunity to attend “The largest tech conference in the world” arose last week for us as Founders at VERI. Outside of our planned budget, cheap flights meant a round trip of Faro, Lisbon, Amsterdam and Dublin in 48 hours. But, as a business based on education, digitization and innovation, the only decision was who would go?
A crazy month for us as our CTO Shane had a new baby girl, we graduated from early stage to closing funding round as a High Potential Start-Up (HPSU) company with EI and were adopted by Google in Ireland as a finalist for their Adopt a Start-Up Programme with €120,000 to play for, we flipped a coin and a few days later I joined the other 60,000 followers of disruption to Lisbon.

These are my takeaways on skills-based training and digitalisation change management from our first Web Summit.
Skills based training: Robots abounded at the web summit, with Sophia the Robot taking a talk on centre stage. Her creator Ben Goertzel, Hanson Robotics said that
“Artificial intelligence will free humans from work. We will be able to move on to a more meaningful existence”
However, it is being voted for and agreed that “Skilled workers will be less affected by increasing AI & tech”

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that every time there has been a big shift in technology, go back to cars or airplanes, people thought the industries were going to die, people were going to be out of work. What happened is it shifted, and it actually augmented and allowed, even more, jobs, more opportunity, more commerce and so AI is going to do the same thing. The opportunity for skilled workers will increase rather than decrease according to the Krzanich.
Digitalisation: Change “Innovation is not only in Technology, innovation is a mindset”
Since we launched 12 months ago I have met with decision makers in private, public and voluntary groups. Those with an innovation mindset take the risk of doing things differently and coming on board with us at Veri, but the risk is negated by potential of doing things better. This was really well illustrated at the recent QQI digitalisation agenda conference,  where progress and disruption was received really well by the 400 Plus Education professionals in the room.
Des Trainer Co-founder of Intercom encouraged young companies to work with other young companies as decision making in larger less agile environments slows everything down so much that they never catch up to capture the real benefit of the new technological advances in their sector.
Blended Learning: Hanging out at the Google Augmented Reality stand with their dozens of coaches supporting bigdata #education via #google Expeditions, a quote from a speaker resonated with me
“we need to learn how to learn what we do today we won’t do tomorrow”
Google didn’t put 30 screens on their stand to give technologist e-learning content or access to their Google Expeditions. The coach was the chosen medium for learning. Whether a leaner is a construction site labourer, or a healthcare worker, or an apprentice on the job, the resources for learning have changed radically. Blended learning is the ideal, with information transfer fine for e-leaning but the need for skills based training always there and will be increased as the value of their crafts increases.

At the opening Stephen Hawking, the famed physicist, said that the said technology could be “the worst event in the history of our civilization.” But he also said it could be our biggest opportunity.
In summary the Web Summit illustrated that Digitisation doesn’t mean there are less skilled workers, it means they are able to focus and we’re able to work smarter … we’re able to serve more of mankind with the skills that we have. Veri’s software helps trainers to track and review training performance from their mobile phone – making the use of paper forms redundant, reducing administration time by up to 30% and allowing users to get insights of the quality process via analytics of the outputs of their training.

We at Veri have this as our aim, to assist the improvement of quality and outcomes from skills based training while reducing the costs and ensuring compliance for more information visit Veri.ie