Hosted by Jeff Walter, Founder and CEO of LatitudeLearning
In this episode of the Training Impact Podcast, host Jeff Walter sits down with Bill Ryan, the Director of Technical and Clinical Education at Ziemer Ophthalmic Systems AG, a Swiss-based manufacturer of femtosecond lasers and diagnostic systems used in refractive and therapeutic eye surgeries. From LASIK flap creation to corneal transplants, these devices demand technical mastery—and Bill is the person behind ensuring that mastery happens.
With decades of experience in medical laser technology, Bill walks us through his fascinating journey from electronics engineer to building a sophisticated, multilayered global training infrastructure for Ziemer’s distributors, internal service teams, and even end-users like doctors and clinical staff.
Bill’s foray into training started with a practical need: no one was writing the service manuals. Over time, that tactical involvement grew into a strategic mission—to develop a training ecosystem that met rigorous regulatory standards, adapted to continuous product evolution, and supported global users across cultures, languages, and job functions.
He explains how regulatory shifts in Europe forced medical device companies like Ziemer to move beyond “butts-in-seats” training to trackable, measurable, and version-specific certifications. In response, Bill built a system using LatitudeLearning’s LMS to ensure real-time tracking of:
This led to one of the episode’s biggest insights: Dynamic Certification. If the software or product changes, your certification may automatically expire until you re-train. It’s not just forward-thinking—it’s compliance-critical.
Ziemer’s learning audiences span internal service engineers, distributor technicians, product managers, and medical providers across five continents. Bill discusses the balancing act between creating robust technical training for those installing and servicing the devices—and efficient application training for doctors using the devices in real-world procedures.
For example:
He also dives into the challenges of global adoption, noting how different regions respond differently to online training. In some countries, pre-training is expected; in others, cultural norms or operational constraints make eLearning adoption slower. His takeaway: adoption requires not just a training system but a marketing mindset.
When it comes to content creation, Bill’s a powerhouse. He uses tools like:
His next frontier? Blending virtual spokespeople into Storyline-based modules to create a more engaging learner experience—while reducing production and update time dramatically.
And speaking of updates, the AI-enabled translation and modular video creation help Ziemer stay responsive to product updates, compliance changes, and evolving learning needs—all without overhauling entire training modules.
While his focus began in the service department, Bill sees the bigger picture: training isn’t just for compliance—it’s a business enabler. He advocates for breaking down departmental silos to centralize and optimize all learning across the company—whether it’s HR onboarding, QA compliance, or clinical insights.
The end goal? A unified training ecosystem that makes it easier to scale, track, and optimize learning across the entire organization.
Bill Ryan isn’t just building courses—he’s engineering a global learning ecosystem for high-stakes medical technology. From dynamic certifications and multilingual content to regulatory compliance and cultural adoption, Ziemer’s training program is a blueprint for how to make learning a strategic pillar of product success.
To learn more about Ziemer Ophthalmic Systems AG and their innovations in refractive surgery and laser technology, visit: https://www.ziemergroup.com/us/
Jeff Walter (00:05)
Hi, I’m Jeff Walter, and welcome back to the podcast. I have a special guest today. His name’s Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic.
Bill is the director of technical and clinical education at Zeamer Ophthalmology Systems, which is a Swiss company that manufactures ventosecond lasers that are used in a variety of applications on the eye, including cataract surgery, flap creation for LASIK treatments, as well as other therapeutic applications such as partial and full corneal transplants and refractive treatment based on uncontilled extraction.
Zemur also manufactures a refractive laser system that’s used to perform lasik ablation, as well as diagnostic devices that precisely measure the three-dimensional shape of the eye. Bill has been working for the company since 2011 and became involved in e-learning content development and management of the e-learning sites since 2017. Welcome to the podcast, Bill.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (01:02)
Thanks, it’s a pleasure to be here and thank you for the invitation.
Jeff Walter (01:06)
Yeah, so I’m always interested in how people ended up where they’re at. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background, how you ended up running the training program for Zemer, and a little bit more about Zemer. So this is very interesting training program because it’s all surrounding around medical devices and training people on the use of the medical device.
Give us a little bit of your background. How did you end up where you’re at? You’ve been on the learning side since 2017 with Ziemar since 2011. So how did you end up running the training program for Ziemar?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (01:41)
Yeah, well, in my background, you know, after I finished my studies in electronics engineering, I luckily got into the business of medical lasers. And I’ve been in this business since 1987. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in this business. And at the time, it was very new technology. Now you see lasers everywhere, you know, in your computer, your in your entertainment center at home.
Jeff Walter (01:55)
wow.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (02:05)
Everywhere you can find a laser saw, but back in the day, they were very, very rare, particularly in the medical business. So most of the companies that I worked for were basically startup companies. And I learned in this environment that everyone’s kind of learning together and how do you communicate the best practices and service procedures.
and applications usage, how do you communicate this to people? And in the past, we had classroom courses, of course, and on-site training with the doctors and clinical staff. During this time, I got involved in document development, writing service manuals and technical procedures. Yeah, so that’s my background in.
in this kind of education aspect of it. In 1995, I entered the world of refractive surgery with Lasik with the company here in Florida called LaserSight. And they didn’t have an education system at the time. They didn’t have any real technical documentation. luckily, it was a startup company and they allowed me the opportunity to
contribute as much as I wanted to, you And then in this role, I developed the service manual and the training curriculum for this. So this really started the ball rolling in terms of my going down the path of education.
Jeff Walter (03:17)
Right.
So what
gravitated, mean, a couple of things. One is, I think that’s one of the underappreciated things of small companies and startups, you know, and working for them is you can really have an opportunity to take on as much responsibility in whatever areas you want because there’s so much to do and so few people to do it. But what, what, what was, what gravitated?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (03:51)
Yeah.
Jeff Walter (03:54)
What was the thing pulling you into the educational learning space?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (03:59)
Well, was a need that had to be filled, you know? And it’s just kind of my personality type that, you know, when I understand how to do something.
Jeff Walter (04:03)
Uh-huh.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (04:09)
or understand how something works, I kind of like to share that knowledge with other people. That’s just my personality type.
Jeff Walter (04:17)
So, and then learning and development makes perfect sense. So, okay, so you’re at the startup, that’s where you got into the learning and development side of things, going from the documentation over to more of a training. And then where’d we go from there?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (04:32)
Yeah, so my career led me to different companies and I was in all of these companies, I was contributing in the same kind of way, know, documentation for most of the time service procedures. And eventually, I found my way to Zemer. And I started out actually as a service and application engineer taking responsibility for Latin America market for
installation, repairs, maintenance and training of the devices. During this time, Zeamer developed a new line of lasers that they really didn’t have anybody who was interested in writing the service manuals, basically. And they learned that I had some experience and I wasn’t hired to do that job. I was hired as a different role. But they learned that I had some experience in doing this.
Jeff Walter (04:59)
Okay.
Right.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (05:21)
and was interested in.
in taking the responsibility with the company. And fortunately, they gave me the opportunity not only to take the role, but I actually lived in Switzerland for four or five years, taking care of it in Switzerland.
Jeff Walter (05:33)
Nice.
So that’s how you got into learning and development within Xeamer.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (05:39)
Exactly. My foot in the door
was document, technical document writing.
Jeff Walter (05:45)
So let’s talk a little bit more about the program. So what are you and the company trying to accomplish with the training program that you’re managing? What’s the goal? Who are we training? What are we hoping they can do? What do you hope to accomplish?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (06:05)
Yeah, so with the training program, we have a responsibility not only to train our internal staff. At the moment, we have, I think, 20-something direct employees working for the service department. And when I say service department, this means maintenance and installation and repair of the devices, upgrades when necessary, but also training the doctors and clinical staff, the usage of the devices.
Jeff Walter (06:31)
So, okay, so it’s the technicians that are, the service technicians that are doing the install, maintenance and repair and the providers, the doctors, et cetera, that are actually using the equipment.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (06:44)
and the end user training, the doctors and clinic staff. But in addition to that, we have…
Jeff Walter (06:47)
Yeah.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (06:49)
We have a lot of distributors that we’re working with. ⁓ And in fact, the distributors are taking the main role in servicing and training the end users. So with my job, I have actually a couple of different audiences if we’re specifically about maintenance, technical issues, let’s say, and applications issues, which are the usage of the device.
Jeff Walter (06:52)
Okay.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (07:15)
So I have the direct employees that we have to worry about training and have to worry about the distributors as well. And quite important in this line of business is regulatory requirements. It happened, fortunately, I came across Latitude Learning in about 2016. I think we started our relationship around that. But around this time, there was a…
Jeff Walter (07:39)
Mm-hmm.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (07:42)
regulatory requirement that came up in Europe due to an adverse event. I don’t remember exactly what the event was, but there was a lot of regulatory changes that came about. And one of the changes was we have to know who was trained, when they were trained, who did the training, and how are we quantifying the effectiveness of the training. Before ⁓
Jeff Walter (08:06)
Right, okay.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (08:09)
Not only with Zeamer, but every other company that I worked with, somebody comes to the classroom training, they put their themselves in a chair and they stay there for the duration of the course. There’s a there’s a test at the end and you are now certified. OK, but that’s not good enough anymore. OK, and so the requirement is who did the training on what? And also is this
the procedures that you have been trained, are they still valid? Okay, so it could be that they were trained on a version of software that’s no longer valid anymore in the field. So we can’t say this person is certified anymore because that software will not be on their systems. the e-learning sites, as I said, we started our relationship in 2016 when this
changes in Europe came about. And that gave me the opportunity to really configure the e-learning site as a tool that we can use to monitor all these things. Who’s been trained when, who did the training, and also put a certification structure into place where when we have product updates in the field through the site, I can actually
in the back end programming, can change the certification requirement so that a person who was certified before, now we have a different procedure and they will automatically lose their certification until they take the associated course and then their certification is back in place again. So this really helps the quality department and service management keep track on.
who’s doing the right thing in the field.
Jeff Walter (09:53)
So
it’s a dynamic certification. I do everything that I need to do to get certified in this particular product. But then as the product evolves, I can lose my certification because I’m certified on something that’s five years old. And we’ve completely changed the same product name, but completely upgraded things. And that was a different way of doing things. Interesting.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (09:57)
Yes.
Jeff Walter (10:19)
Hey, you said something earlier about the regulations about the effectiveness of the training. So how do you guys measure that? from a regulatory standpoint, that’s the first time I heard from a regulatory standpoint, measuring effectiveness. Usually most regulations that are tied to training are focused on more that first part that you said, know, butts in the seat, that, know, so and so attended the training or
or took the online course and they got their check and so, boom, regulatory wise, you’re okay. But you said that the EU, that there was some effectiveness requirements. So what’s the regulation there? Like what are they asking for from an effectiveness standpoint?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (11:00)
Well,
excuse me. Well, in fact, I perhaps misspoke in that are the people certified? And so that is the effectiveness measurement is are they certified to work on the equipment? And in the course structures that I develop, there are a couple of different ways that people take the associated courses.
Jeff Walter (11:07)
Okay.
okay.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (11:25)
And I’ll take the technical basic course as an example. It has something like 21 individual procedures that have to be trained. And of these 21 procedures, most of them are e-learning in an e-learning format. I use Storyline as the content development tool. so we’ll have tests in the end, sometimes interactive tests to see if people know
Yeah, if the course was effective enough that they can pass the test, let’s say. ⁓ Yeah. And then we have self-study courses for things that are less critical in the field as well.
Jeff Walter (11:59)
Right, right. That they’ve acquired the necessary knowledge.
So, but then, does the, I’m just curious on the regulation side, because was the regulation a thing that drove the dynamic certification or were you thinking of dynamic certification regardless of the regulation?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (12:22)
Well, chronology of this was essentially while these changes were coming about was when I started with Latitude Learning. And so then I had it already in the back of my mind, know, this has to happen. How can I make it happen? And unfortunately, the Latitude platform supports that.
Jeff Walter (12:31)
Yeah.
Okay.
okay. So, so the dynamic certification was something that you were like, okay, we, it’s something you wanted to do, but then it also ties into the regular, it helps on the regulatory side in that if somebody is certified, they’re certified on the latest and greatest version of the certification versus, you I got it 10 years ago and, you know, I haven’t learned, I haven’t focused on anything. Okay.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (13:12)
And it’s also
quite helpful from the quality management. I would say Xeamer is quite thorough in their audits. when somebody, and we don’t do audits on a, you know, we have a lot of distributors and we have a lot of internal persons as well. So, you know, many times in the audit process for the distributors, are audited on a biannual basis. So every two years they look at how they’re.
they’re operating. The internal people, believe, are on annual basis. But what will happen is quality manager will take a random service case and say, OK, this person did this service job. Were they trained to do this service job? And at the time they did this service job, were they trained on the correct procedures for that time? Because, yeah, exactly.
Jeff Walter (14:01)
Right, at that moment, yeah.
So do you guys have any requirements on the distributors in terms of like the certification at the individual level, but is there a certified distributor or a distributor has to have a certain number of certified people or like if you take the example you just threw out there, it’s like, okay, let’s just assume the person was not certified.
It doesn’t mean that they did it wrong, it just means that they hadn’t completed the training.
Why would a distributor spend the time and energy to have their people certified? there a requirement there? Is it half the people? How is it in the distributor’s best interest to get their people certified?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (14:49)
Well, it’s actually a requirement from a corporate standpoint that the people who are working with the systems need to be certified.
Jeff Walter (14:56)
Okay, so part of the business relationship between the distributor and and Zemer is that the people doing the service work will be certified. And therefore when they do that, you had mentioned that audit earlier, if they find that they were not certified, the question would be why. And, know, it might be some perfectly reasonable explanation, like you guys just updated the certification.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (15:05)
That’s correct.
Jeff Walter (15:21)
I, as the service technician, was certified yesterday, lost my certification today, went out and did a job, and then tomorrow I took the course and got recertified, right? And you would look at that and go, okay, that was the exception, but the expectation is that everybody is certified.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (15:40)
Yeah, that’s true. ⁓ And it happens quite often that way. And also as a company, have to be really…
Jeff Walter (15:41)
Okay.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (15:46)
sensitive to the fact that our distributors they don’t sell only our product they sell lots of other products so when they go out into the field you know they have other things that they have to do and so we have to be you know conscious about this and understanding of course but also we have to be a little bit you know a little bit firm sometimes and say look okay please keep up to date with you with your certifications else you know we will have a
situation with the audit, ⁓
Jeff Walter (16:16)
Right.
Yeah, that makes sense. so getting back to who’s getting trained, you’ve got the internal service folks, and then you have your distributor service folks. Is there any sales training, or is it all on the service side?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (16:35)
It is. There are other training audiences that participate from time to time. Sales managers, product managers for our distributors and also internal attendee, the trainings, the classroom trainings, and we make the e-learning available to them online. However, the e-learning is for.
know, sales people and product management and others, they’re not a requirement. So I had to set it up in the background, in the back end that, you know, certain persons with a particular profile, they are expected to keep their certifications. Others who are not in this profile, we don’t care about the certifications. We encourage them to take the course, but we don’t require to take the course.
Jeff Walter (17:01)
Okay.
Right.
Okay, so on the sales side, it’s more of a self-directed program. You’ve got the training there, it’s available, you encourage people to do it, but you’re not assigning the training to them, you’re not requiring it of your distributors. But on the service side, which completely makes, I I totally understand on the service side because…
This is a medical device that can do great damage if it’s not working properly.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (17:55)
Yeah, and also
from the application side. So we have two basic groups that we’re training. We have this technical service that we’re training and application support. And in Zemer corporate in Switzerland, and also we have an affiliate in Germany, they blended those two roles together so that we can have the same person who is doing service support and application support.
The US affiliate has split it so we have technical only and applications only. so the applications persons are also expected to maintain their certification. But the certification requirements are not as rigid because we don’t have so many changes to the certifications when they first came to the training, you know.
Jeff Walter (18:34)
Okay.
Right. Okay. And then you had mentioned earlier that another audience and that was the medical staff, the doctors and nurses and the actual providers that are doing it. How does that work? What’s the nature of the training there? How does that program look like?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (19:00)
Yeah, so with the end user training, this is something that’s more recent with the e-learning site. We had some new applications introduced in the last couple of years, and we’ve made some.
significant changes to some of the applications we’ve done in terms of the device settings and so on. So the idea is, and the idea from my side was always to encourage the end users to take certain courses so they’re familiar with the technology and they’re familiar with the application that’s going to be trained. And the idea for all this is that
you know, for us to do the training on site personally, that’s a two day job. If I can take some of this time and have the…
If the user can take some of these courses, that should potentially shorten the on-site time. So that’s the third audience. It’s now kind of getting…
Jeff Walter (19:54)
Okay.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (19:59)
Yet it’s getting a slower start than I would like. ⁓ But there’s also some challenges that we have from the acceptance or the what’s what I’m looking
Jeff Walter (20:01)
Okay.
participation rates or
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (20:10)
Yeah, because it’s a little bit not how we worked in the past, know, adoption, let’s say. Yeah. So, I mean, I put in a lot of time in collaboration with my work colleagues in developing some multi-language courses. And we want to push these out to the different markets so that the doctors can have a look at them before we show up.
Jeff Walter (20:16)
Okay, so you know adoption of the change yeah
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (20:36)
In certain markets, it’s working. There is a requirement that before we come for training, please do all of this. And there’s somebody following up. In other markets, it’s like the doctors are not interested. They don’t have the time. The staff cannot do it during their working hours, and they’re not going to do it on their private time. So it’s a different dynamic.
Jeff Walter (20:58)
But that’s interesting because it points to different cultural norms. Usually when we think of culture, we think of more pop culture with it. But there’s also cultural norms within professions. And it depends on the type of work arrangement. And you guys are, Zeemer is a global company. You’re selling in all the major continents. So you’re running into different modalities of.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (21:10)
Yeah.
Jeff Walter (21:22)
or different types of healthcare systems with different relation, provider relationships and different attitudes. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, interesting that, you know, because I mean, we’ve experienced, you know, or in our, in our clients, that blended learning of take the e-learning first, you can get, not only does it the amount of time down in the classroom, but also the classroom experiences are much richer learning experience for the learner.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (21:25)
and different attitude.
Jeff Walter (21:48)
because usually in a classroom you end up teaching to the lowest common denominator, right? And so it’s interesting that it’s interesting. It just reminds me that it’s a big world and there’s a lot of different people out there with a lot of different viewpoints of how to do things. So that’s pretty interesting. And on that side, it’s all how to use, another question I had.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (21:52)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jeff Walter (22:12)
You’ve used the word applications several times, and I’m a software guy because we run a software company here. So I always think of software applications, but was that what you were referring to or was it application of the device to a certain procedure?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (22:27)
That’s a little bit of both because when we’re doing a LASIK procedure, for example, we have a software specific for that, for that app, for that surgery type. Yeah. So we have to, we use the hardware in a different way by software control. So in this aspect, we have the LASIK software, but then we have to teach the doctor and the clinic staff how to navigate the software and also what they have to do with the patient.
Jeff Walter (22:39)
Okay.
Okay, so when you’re using applications, it’s more device application, and then along with that comes some application-specific software applications. Does that sound about right? Did I get that right? Okay, interesting. So those are kind of, and again, back to what you’re trying to accomplish here.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (23:10)
Yeah.
Jeff Walter (23:19)
I guess it’s, you you want to make sure that the technicians know what they’re doing in installing servicing. And so you’re doing that. And that the medical providers know how to use the equipment properly, right? So that you get the medical outcomes that you’re hoping for. So what have you found to some of the challenges of, we’ve touched on some of that, but.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (23:34)
That’s correct,
Jeff Walter (23:42)
Just in general challenges, you know, we talked on some of the challenges in terms of, you know, getting people to certain classes or courses, but just in general, what are some of the challenges running this type of program? And especially on a global scale, you you touched on some of them, some cultural differences or ways in which, you know, doctors in one part of the world behave differently than doctors in another part of the world. But what some of the challenges you guys have been facing or you’ve been facing trying to roll this out?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (24:12)
Yeah, I would say initially the challenges were getting the back end of the…
of the e-learning site configured to the point where I could just basically let it run by itself. So there’s not a lot of, I shouldn’t say that there are interactions that I have to make from time to time, but the certification management is pretty well handled in the site. The challenges are actually more from a usage standpoint. So discuss now.
Jeff Walter (24:25)
Okay.
Right.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (24:44)
the challenges of trying to get our end users to log on and take these materials. And we have to put in an internal process to try to enforce that a little bit better. So now this is nothing to do with the site, but it’s more to do with how do we manage it as a company? And in addition,
Jeff Walter (24:56)
Okay.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (25:03)
I became involved with this to take to handle the need for making sure that our internal staff and our partners are trained and they’re certified. And so that’s that’s was the original intention. However, in the back of my mind, as I said before, always was trying to get the end users involved so we can shorten the training time. That said, if you look around
Jeff Walter (25:12)
Mm-hmm.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (25:28)
any company, Zemer is no exception. There’s training needs everywhere. Everywhere you look, there’s the need for training. So we have, you know, the
HR needs to train their people on certain things. The quality department has training. Production has training. Clinical medical affairs has training. There’s everywhere people are doing trainings. And a little bit challenging is that, you know, how do we track who’s been trained? And unfortunately, with not only this company, but every other company that I worked with, every department has their own training plan and they track it in a different way. And if you ask
who has been trained on this individual thing, then somebody is looking for an Excel sheet someplace to like they can print it out and show it, you know. And we have the tools that we need. can put all of this together in one training program. And so the challenge that I have is trying to get the interested parties to latch onto this idea that, you know,
I’m here for you too, you know, it’s not only the distributors and technical people, I can help out every department.
Jeff Walter (26:32)
Ha
Interesting. yeah, it sounds like that, you know, that it’s always a challenge departmentally when, I, you know, that I own this turf, you know, but there’s a better way of doing things, but the better way of doing things requires me seating some of my authority as it were. But yeah.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (27:00)
Well, there’s this and there’s
also, I’ve been working in this department since forever and we’ve always done it like this. So why should we change it when it’s working for me? And it also might be something like, we’ve always done it this way.
Jeff Walter (27:06)
Right.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (27:12)
Why have you always done it this way? There might be a good reason. We’ve always done it this way. Or there might be no reason. I just inherited it and this is is why we did it all the time, you know.
Jeff Walter (27:22)
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting.
was just talking to a client and it’s, you know, there’s a lot of, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You know, like, cause you can’t focus on everything all the time. So things that are working, you just kind of let sit is kind of the default. I,
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (27:41)
Yeah,
the Swiss say never touch a working system.
Jeff Walter (27:46)
Right. Yeah. And I was just talking with client. We were going through some processes. And the interesting thing was, and that’s fine. And then like time goes by and what you can do changes, right? Because the technology and the tools available to you change. And we were going through a couple of, and these weren’t major processes, but we were going through a couple of processes. It was like,
we did that because five, 10, you 10 years ago, that was the only way you could do it. And now, you know, there’s so much cloud computing out there. We should put that on the cloud. so like, there’s like just a bunch of things like that. It’s like, Hey, why are you doing this this way? And it turns out, well, that was the best way to do it 10 years ago. You know,
But life has changed. And now there’s actually a better way to do it that can save money. it was really, it wasn’t necessarily, we weren’t necessarily focused on learning in particular. It was more of a technical, you know, technology thing. But it was really interesting. It was really interesting to, for me, it’s like, you know, if it’s not what you just said, if the system isn’t broken, don’t fix it. But.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (28:50)
Hmm.
Jeff Walter (29:02)
But then if enough time passes and you go look at it and you challenge, you kind of bring up challenge the initial assumptions, you’ll find, well, that was the best solution at the time. And now we can do it better and cheaper. Right. And it was just, it’s just interesting because it’s going off topic a little bit, but it’s one of those interesting dynamics is, well, you can’t focus on everything all the time.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (29:16)
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Walter (29:30)
because there’s a lot of everything encompasses a lot, right? But so if it isn’t broken, you you kind of ignore it. But then you kind of really want to, you know, occasionally circle back around or periodically circle back around because, you know, your base assumptions might have changed.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (29:49)
Yeah, and I can actually
give you a perfect example that jumps into my mind as you were talking. During my career in document development and technical documentation, everything’s on a piece of paper, right? And Zemer is no exception. Our quality management system is based on paper. So if we have an audit…
Jeff Walter (29:53)
Yeah.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (30:12)
somebody wants to look at the piece of paper that was valid at the time. And nobody’s working with paper in the field anymore. And if I look at some of the procedures that I have to write, we have a lot of heavy software interaction in our service procedures. So if I take the, I think the worst example will be a particular procedure where
Jeff Walter (30:21)
Right.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (30:34)
They have to go through a number of different software screens. And me writing the procedure, have, you know, I’m forced to like quantify what people have to do. And I was like, there’s 25 clicks that somebody must have, they must do on this, on the software to do this. If I print this on a piece of paper, it’s a 50 page document, you know? And.
Jeff Walter (30:50)
Hmm.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (30:58)
And who are we making the printed documents for? For the auditors. It’s not for the people in the field. So I sort of got around this by it’s possible these days to in a Word document, can import a GIF or a GIF. I don’t know how you pronounce it. So I can make a small video and show the software interactions in one screen, in one area of the screen.
So they just have to watch this video and it keeps the size of the document shorter. But exactly what you said before, technology has moved along and we have better tools to use now.
Jeff Walter (31:37)
That’s interesting. you still have the paper because you can print off that document, but you’ve embedded a video into the document and therefore the consumer of the document. The document can be much shorter and they watch the video to get the click here, click here, click here to do what you need to do. That’s pretty cool.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (31:59)
Yeah, mean,
nobody’s printing the documents in the field and can carry around, you know, we don’t have the encyclopedias anymore, nobody’s carrying all that paper around and everyone’s using their computer or iPad anyway.
Jeff Walter (32:08)
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, you know, it’s funny on a completely separate note. Every time I go into our supply room, there’s the old binders, the old binding machine, know, we’re to, you know, you know, well, no, no, for like a presentation or something, you know, you, you know, the, little plastic binders and they would open it up and you know, you would, you know, you put like the, you know, it would punch like the,
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (32:24)
Three rain binders.
Hmm.
Jeff Walter (32:37)
dozen holes in the presentation and then the plastic binder would, you you had the thing, you opened it up, you put them and it closed it. And every time, I mean, it’s, sitting that and all the supplies are sitting in our supply room. And every time I go in there to grab something, I look at that and I’m like, we really need to throw that out. We haven’t used it in over a decade because yeah, well, cause yeah.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (32:46)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jeff Walter (33:03)
to your point on the paper and all that, it’s like, well, that’s what you used to do, right? You used to print off the presentation and hand it out to folks. Now, nobody does that. Nobody. It’s like, yo, if I’m going to share it, I’ll share it. I’ll either send it to you or I’ll send you a link, right? And nobody wants the paper. So it’s kind of funny. So back to training. OK, so we’ve got those guys. You were saying one of the biggest challenges was getting to
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (33:20)
Yeah, exactly.
Jeff Walter (33:32)
getting people to engage, especially if it wasn’t required, because it’s a different way of doing it. It’s just a new approach to doing things. And so that’s a challenge. What techniques have you tried to do to get people to engage in a different way? I bet it’s a better place, because they’re engaging in a certain way, and you want them to engage in a different way. What has been a good technique there?
to help make that happen.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (34:02)
Well, honestly, I’m still struggling a little bit with that. So I haven’t cracked that nut yet. I’m working a little bit more closely with the marketing department these days. My dynamic in the company is basically I’m working in the service department. ⁓ And so as a result of this, almost all of my activities are based in this area.
Jeff Walter (34:12)
Okay.
Right.
Right.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (34:25)
But as I want to expand this project a little bit more, have to do a lot of different aspects in the company to support this. And this has to do with the corporate look and feel for the courses themselves. The graphics need to be commonly used throughout different presentations and so on. So with this, I’m starting to work.
more with the marketing and graphics design team. And I’m pleased that they are open to working with me and looks like they’re happy to do this. And when we get to the point where we have, let’s say, more streamlined the course,
course look, guess you can say, the branding. Branding is what I’m looking for. When we’ve more streamlined and synchronized this, then I guess the one idea that I have is to do a general posting on LinkedIn to see, you know, we have many of our, a lot of our users are on LinkedIn. So try to get some interest in that way. And also if we can put a…
requirement in place so that’s enforced that, okay, we want to train the doctor on a cataract procedure. Please take this cataract materials before we arrive. I’ve worked in other companies where they had reasonable amount of success doing this where they will look, someone will look at the assigned courses and say, you know, doctor,
I’m happy you took the courses because now we can finalize our travel arrangements. Or the other side can be, know, doctor, we would really like to make the travel arrangements, but.
Jeff Walter (35:56)
⁓ Where?
We’re not going to do that until you take the prerequisite e-learning. How interesting. On the LinkedIn thing, I’ve recently started posting a bunch of shorts on there and it’s amazing how many views they get. To your point about pushing things to LinkedIn, I’d recommend that and it’s a good way of-
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (36:04)
Yes, exactly.
Jeff Walter (36:19)
starting to get people to, acculturate them to change. And we’ve been posting short videos and, helps, I think it helps gets the message out from a market, because we all have to market, to a certain degree, right? you’re trying to get people to change behavior. I think your relationship with marketing is a good idea. I think there’ll be some.
Because at the end of the day, that’s a marketing exercise to get them to voluntarily change.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (36:45)
Yeah, my
involvement with the marketing department with this,
Jeff Walter (36:49)
Yeah.
So I think we’ve got a good handle on the understanding of the program as it stands today. There’s a lot going on in the industry. AI is all over the place for every industry. But where do see the program going in the future? If you could design the program that you wanted to design, where would you take this? Where do you want to be in the future?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (37:16)
Yeah, I’m looking at this at the moment more from the content development standpoint. And as you said, there’s a lot of stuff going on these days with AI.
One thing which has me a little bit excited now, and I’m hoping to get by off from the corporate standpoint is that at the moment, the courses that I develop are a combination of didactic and theoretical and hands-on or interactive. So I have at the moment basically a static avatar who’s
speaking through speech bubbles, but in fact, it’s just text to speech that I’ve put in there. Text to speech has come a long ways as well. But I’d like to make this more personal, you know? So the idea is that there are some, I think they’re marketed as virtual, that’s what I’m looking for. Yeah.
Jeff Walter (37:59)
yeah.
Like the avatars?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (38:16)
Virtual spokesperson, I think we’re talking about. I’m trying to see if I could have the didactic portion instead of having the static avatar with the speech bubble to have more of a live avatar, let’s say, speaking. And it would be more like the YouTube videos that you see everywhere, yeah.
Jeff Walter (38:18)
⁓ okay.
Yeah. Have you looked into any tools to help on the creation on that side yet? Tools to author that, to create those dynamic spokespeople.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (38:44)
Yeah, what do you mean?
Yeah, I’ve looked into a site called HeyGen, H-E-Y-G-E-N, and that looks like it could be quite useful. It also has an advantage that you can record yourself or anyone from your company. you can use one of you working for the company, or you can use one of their standard actors that they have as well. Yeah, and it will also take the, you put in the,
Jeff Walter (39:11)
interesting.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (39:16)
text that you want and it will has the option for translating in I think there’s a ridiculous amount of languages like 70 languages it can translate into.
Jeff Walter (39:27)
And you said it was H-E-Y-G-E-N? Was that? OK. Yeah, it was interesting because one of the we started using is Synthesia, which does a similar type thing. You can pick from their avatars. And then it’s all text to speech type of thing.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (39:30)
Yeah.
Jeff Walter (39:51)
And one of the benefits of that that we’ve seen and that I’m starting to hear other people mention is, okay, know, it helps you produce the videos and that’s nice. And you can do it a little bit more efficiently than doing a recording of a person. But where the real benefit comes from…
I was talking to somebody and they said the real benefit is when you have to do updates, especially if you’re in a high compliance environment. Because, you know, as the products change, as the compliance requirements change, you don’t have to reshoot the video. You just have to go into the part of the video where the where the compliance had changed, you know, and update it.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (40:36)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jeff Walter (40:36)
You know, so,
you know, and we’ve started seeing that with our own product as we started producing explainer videos. And then, you know, we do an update to that screen, let’s say. And then, you know, we don’t have to reshoot the whole thing. It’s just, you you put a snippet in that says, oh, there’s now this other field and you could do this, right? So it’s interesting. I think it’s really interesting.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (41:03)
Yeah, with this tool, Hey Jen, or the one you said was called.
Jeff Walter (41:07)
Synthesia. So I’m going to check out Hey Jen, I like that idea of taking, you know, yourself. I don’t know if synths-at-ia can do the translations. I haven’t looked into that.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (41:12)
Yeah.
Yeah, so this is one thing that would take care of the didactic portion or the theoretical portion of my courses. But there’s been some really good changes with Storyline. I use Articulate Storyline for content development as well. And they have some cool AI tools built into their software right now, where, give you an example of a recent course that I did. Our bigger
Jeff Walter (41:23)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (41:40)
Markets are English speaking, German. We have a big market in China, Spanish speaking and French. So I’ve developed a few courses in five languages. And, you know, it’s really quite a challenge to do that because I have to develop it first in English and I have to write the script like, you know, entire text of the script has to be written in a Word document someplace. And then I would normally
Jeff Walter (42:05)
Right.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (42:07)
put this through Google Translate or DeepL Translator as a first go. And then I would send it to various colleagues for them to make the corrections. And then to integrate this into Storyline, I have to develop the English course. Everyone agrees it’s correct. And then you can have an automated translation for individual courses as it was prior to the AI integration. So then I would have to
to make five separate courses and then integrate them together. And the time to do this was months to do these courses, you know? It was a ton of work, not only for me, but for my colleagues who I was lucky had the time to help me. But now with Storyline, there is an automated translation feature. So you put your course in.
Jeff Walter (42:40)
Right.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (42:53)
in one part of the menu is just like translate and you can choose how many languages you want it to be translated into. So it’s not just one, it can be three or four or whatever. think Storyline has now not so many like HM, but I think it has, you know, like 11 languages that you can make the automated translation. So this would cut my course development time down from months to weeks, you know.
Jeff Walter (43:17)
Wow. Wow. I mean, that’s huge. That’s a huge increase in productivity. So beyond using AI for content generation, is there anything else in terms of the future of your, well, where you see the program going, where you want to take it? Any other?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (43:38)
Yeah, in
terms of the usage of the device, I would really like to have more of a integrated approach to education in our organization. I mean.
Jeff Walter (43:48)
And
what does that mean, integrated approach? mean, it means something to me, but I don’t know if that’s the same connotation as you’re using the word.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (43:50)
⁓ yeah.
Yeah, so I’ll take an example of a recent course that was a classroom course that was offered. Last year was offered a couple of times as a trial basis, I believe, to see if we can generate some interest. Clinical and medical affairs hosted some courses on
refractive surgery. that means LASIK. That means you can consider cataract in some cases, refractive procedure. There’s a new procedure based on lenticule extraction where, you LASIK will reshape the cornea of a person based on their eyeglass prescription. The lenticule based is essentially
cutting a lens shape out of the cornea and removing that to free people from the need of eyeglasses. So there’s a lot of stuff that are associated with these refractive surgery, including diagnostic devices, surgical techniques, and so on. And clinical and medical affairs had a classroom course that they developed.
Jeff Walter (44:36)
Okay.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (44:51)
but they’re managing it on their own. It’s not part of the e-learning. It’s marketed in a different way. It’s handled in a different way. And I’m like, well, this is part of the learning strategy of the company. So shouldn’t it also be part of the e-learning approach as well? can monitor how everything’s, who has been there, when they for the course and so on. So when I say integrated approach, means
you know, are all the departments leveraging the e-learning site in the best way possible so that we are not creating more work for managers? You know, for example, QA has to train everybody new on the company on QA procedures. That’s taking the managers’ time away from other stuff that they can be doing. So offload this to the e-learning and, you know, that’s, when I say integration, that’s basically what I
Jeff Walter (45:44)
So that’s a pretty comprehensive training program. And it looks like an interesting future in terms of integrating it into the organization as a whole and continuing to evolve it for the medical providers and the
the distributors and service technicians. Shifting gears a little, one of the things I like to ask folks is when you’re not working, what do you like to learn about? I usually find most of the folks in learning and development, we’re big believers in education and acquiring knowledge, and so we usually have things that we like to learn about outside of work, as fascinating as work is.
But outside of work, what’s your favorite thing to learn about?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (46:31)
Well, in fact, some people would say I work is my life in some aspects. I do it because I love doing it. I love what I do. And so when I’m not working, actually, in fact, some of my time is spent actually learning how to use the tools more effectively than I’m already using. So there’s a lot of resources on Storyline.
Jeff Walter (46:37)
Right.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (46:51)
that you can use to more effectively develop courses and use the features of the software. Also the same with Camtasia. I make small videos with Camtasia for didactic parts of my e-learning and it’s really cool program. You can do a lot with Camtasia.
Jeff Walter (47:10)
Well, you know, it’s funny when you said that you reminded me of one of my father-in-law’s favorite phrases, which was, you know, find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. ⁓ I, well, I’m a myself personally, I’m, I’m a technologist at heart, but more on the user side than on the developer side, even though I was a programmer back in my ancient history.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (47:18)
That’s right, yeah.
Jeff Walter (47:33)
So I just love playing with tools And you know like and seeing what and seeing what you can do with them because it’s they’re constantly changing You know like and I haven’t been in cantasia. I’ve used I thought that was I like that. I haven’t used it in a while So you so you like cantasia?
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (47:36)
Okay.
Yeah, it’s very flexible. You can do a lot with it,
Jeff Walter (47:55)
I’ll have to put that back on because I like making videos. I need to make one for my kids.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (48:01)
As
a matter of fact, like everybody else, I browse YouTube and just keep it up on current events or maybe learning how to use the software tools that I enjoy using. And I can look at how the courses are or how these videos are put together. And I can tell pretty much the ones that were done with Camp 3D.
Jeff Walter (48:22)
There we have if I recall it was a pretty very easy to use and powerful tool which is hard to It’s it’s hard to hit that that thread like I use The Adobe product Premiere Pro And I think it’s very powerful, but it’s also very can very difficult to use Yeah
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (48:36)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah,
I tried a few times the Adobe products and my general impression is you can do everything that you want to do with it. I’m not taking nothing bad to say from that standpoint, but I also think in many cases it’s more complicated than it needs to be.
Jeff Walter (48:51)
Right.
Yeah, that’s what I could, yeah, with that and with Photoshop, just, I find, I can, to your point, I can do anything I want with this, but because I can do anything, everything is non-intuitive.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (49:12)
Yeah, I agree with that 100%.
Jeff Walter (49:13)
Whereas
when I use another tool, like I used Snagit, I used the Snagit editor to edit a lot of photos because it’s just, I can’t do everything, but it’s really easy to edit photos, right? And I was using Camtasia in the past and I haven’t. So I’ll have to get back into that.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (49:30)
Actually, my
most used tools are Snagit, Snagit Editor, Camtasia, and Storyline.
Jeff Walter (49:36)
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. All right. Well, Bill, thank you so much. Well, first of all, thank you for your ongoing support as a client. We greatly appreciate it. I greatly appreciate it. But thank you for agreeing to join me on this podcast and share your training program with everyone. I think we learned a lot. I love these because I always learn something. And so.
I appreciate you educating me and then teaching me some things. So, and that’s great. And I just really appreciate your time. Thank you for taking time out of your day to talk to us and share your story with us.
Bill Ryan of Ziemer Ophthalmic (50:10)
Okay, and thanks for your invitation. I was quite flattered to receive it. It’s been my pleasure to share a few moments with you.
Jeff Walter (50:18)
And all the viewers out there and listeners, thank you so much for your ongoing viewing and listening. And we’ll see you later. Take care.