About Me

10+ years of enterprise eLearning: Try It Now Training, where the accounts included iHeartMedia and Gilead Sciences, and then Visa. Sales enablement, product lifecycle, tokenization, compliance.

Richard Washam LLC is the vehicle for work outside those jobs: the Product Showcase for Visa Inc. (before I joined as staff), a manager soft-skills series for Addison Group, and PQV complaint-intake training for Johnson & Johnson. It's open for new engagements.

Client programs run end to end, from the first stakeholder conversation through to the post-launch numbers.

Before September 2015 I was a graphic designer, paired with a degree in fine arts from Western Illinois University in 2005. It's why I put weight on design that is not just correct but beautiful — work that looks like someone cared, and still makes sense to the person using it.

I question the request. A training request is usually a symptom. The most valuable thing I do in the first week is find out whether the course being asked for is the one that would actually change anything.

I manage the people and the vendors, not just the files. Subject matter experts, change owners, framework authors, contracted design capacity — coordinating those is most of the job on a program of any size.

I use GenAI where it earns its place. Eight Synthesia videos in the cohort program, a Copilot agent prototyped to answer learner questions, and the gates this site ships behind — axe against every route, and a fact guard that refuses any number typed into a template instead of imported. The accessibility checker I built with Claude Code scores HTML courses against Visa’s twenty highest-priority requirements and automates about half the test suite.

Away from work, I can be found spending time with my wife and our young son, who has already changed my mind about several things I was certain of.

I'm learning Portuguese so that I can hold a conversation with my wife's family instead of smiling through one. I play guitar, I play basketball, and I cook — lately working my way into Indian food, which has mostly been a lesson in how much of a technique stays invisible until someone shows you the order things go into the pan.