Small Business Management Courses Online

Small Business Management Courses Online

Many businesspersons starting out or owning a business already need to understand the management aspects of the business, in order to succeed. Small business management courses online offer help with starting a business and teach you how to manage the business after you start up.

Many different management courses offer different criteria and teach various ways of running a company. You might learn time management, handling employees, project management, and tracking of inventory along with other key factors that are needed in operating a business. You can never learn too much when it comes to running a small business. Protecting your investment with management courses allows you to succeed in business.

Because you need dedication and a strong ambition to start and operate a business, taking small business management courses online will allow you to devote your time to your business and learn at the same time. These courses teach about budgeting and insurance along with how to find investors for your business if you need capital. When you take the online courses, you receive all the text, software and any learning materials you require to complete the course. Because these courses come to you online, you can learn at your own pace and at times convenient to your schedule.

Distance learning provides opportunities to many small businesspersons who would not otherwise have the opportunity to learn. Small business management courses online do require discipline and commitment to complete the classes. You should find the time to take the entire class and in a timely manner to ensure you have all the available information about managing your business.
Many people find online learning fun and exciting because they learn in an environment they feel comfortable in and learn well. Distance learning has become popular with millions pf people worldwide, and allows everyone the learning experience needed to succeed.

With so many small business management courses online, you have tests and exams, which are open book, so you have the ability to check facts and supply the correct answers. This allows more people to pass the courses and receive a diploma or certificate. This can help you down the road if you branch out and decide to work for someone else in the future.

Small business management courses online give you the materials and knowledge to write and present a business plan to potential investors, accounting practices and how to effectively market your company. These all help with customer service and employee relations as well. Once you take the course, if you have not started a business already, you will be prepared for your own home business, restaurant, retail or many other small businesses. Once you decide the management courses fit your needs, enroll sit in front of the computer and learn.


Tags: Small Business Management Courses Online

How to Improve Employee Work Performance for Increased Profits

How to Improve Employee Work Performance for Increased Profits

There is a direct correlation between employee work performance and profit. When your employees work at their full potential, generally the business will benefit in many ways, including increased sales, profits, and creativity.

How to improve employee work performance to increase profit is something that many corporations and business owners struggle with. Here are some methods, including e-learning, that successful organizations use:

1. The Internet has been both a boon and a detriment to many businesses. Is your business using the Internet to its full advantage, or is it just a time sink for your employees? Use the Internet its full advantage for marketing and research; however, at the same time you must have written policies in place to limit the time employees spend using the Internet for personal business or fun.
2. Successful business owners and corporations understand the value of employee training and development programs. Use certification and training programs to develop your employees and managers, and to improve their work performance. Powerful online certification programs are available for Leadership and Management skills, Motivation, Negotiation, Business Communications, Time Management skills and much more.
3. Communicate your performance expectations to your employees, review your processes together with your employees to make certain that your processes work well and make changes if necessary to meet your customers needs and requirements. Monitor for measurable results, and reward positive changes in work performance.

How to improve employee work performance? Invest your time and dollars in developing your employees. Providing access to online training and development programs is both cost effective and saves time versus sending employees off-site for training.

Try a free Customer Service or Communications Course now!

Tags: how to improve employee work performance, online employee training and development programs

Negotiation Skills Course from University of Notre Dame

Negotiation Skills Course from University of Notre Dame
Learn the art of negotiation online from University of Notre Dame
Prestigious University of Notre Dame offers an online Executive Certificate business skills course in Negotiation. This course is delivered in three separate and powerful 8-week courses in business negotiation, each containing up to 16 hours of streaming video presentations, independent exercises, and exams.
You can Master the Art of Negotiation ONLINE - with an Executive Certificate from the well-known University of Notre Dame. In today's highly interactive, multicultural world, global economy, negotiation - the ability to interact with and influence others - is more important and more complex than ever before. Successful executives know that as one advances in an organization, interpersonal skills gradually replace technical skills as the crucial drivers of success.
Master the art of negotiation online, at your pace, at your convenience, with the same experts who teach at Notre Dame's top-ranked Mendoza College of Business. This course is for anyone from any profession or industry. The Executive Certificate in Negotiation can make you a more effective communicator and leader, and powerfully enhance your career. University of Notre Dame's Executive Certificate in Negotiation is comprised of the following three eight-week certificate programs, each building on the last in a step-by-step process:
Negotiation Essentials
Advanced Negotiations
Strategies for Conflict Management
You will acquire new skills with each program that you can begin applying immediately and a new certificate that will serve as an important milestone, and an enhancement for your resume. Those individuals who successfully complete all three programs receive their Executive Certificate in Negotiation from the renowned University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, ranked #22 of the best undergraduate business schools by US News & World Report in 2005. These excellent three 8-week courses can also be taken individually if so desired. Students are awarded their certificates upon completion of each course.
Master the Art of Negotiation with an Executive Certificate from Notre Dame - ONLINE! These 8-week programs will give you the power to enhance your influence and success in any business setting.

Tags: online business skills course negotiation, University of Notre Dame

learnability matters » Blog Archive » Rapid eLearning

Rapid eLearning as a tool for business skills training is developing quickly. Here is an interesting discussion on rapid eLearning, and how it can be used as a cost effective business skills training tool.

learnability matters » Blog Archive » Rapid eLearning Rapid eLearning
Today rapid eLearning is the buzzword in the eLearning industry. Rapid eLearning is emerging as the fastest-growing category of online training. It is web-based training created in far-lesser time than traditional eLearning. Rapid eLearning is beneficial on two key counts:

It meets the current demand to rapidly create learning resources to address business events, competitive developments, product trainings, or other business needs.
It helps minimize the time and resource contribution from the client.
Here’s a case study about Kern’s foray into rapid eLearning. The client is a leading training organization in UK. The client has been conducting classroom training for several decades and now wanted to create an online training programme for the same audience. The client wanted Kern to create a WBT on “Tendering for UK/EU Public Sector Contracts” for small and medium enterprises.

The client’s requirements were:

A complete training module on ‘Tendering for Public Sector Contracts’ to be created in 1.5 months (6 weeks) and rolled out to the market by end-March.
The course duration to range from 8-12 hours.
The course had to be SCORM-compliant.
One hour of online course should have 45 minutes of learning time and 15 minutes of practice.
Each session should not exceed 20 minutes.
The course should cater to audience in the age group of 35-65 years.
Approximately 50% of the audience had no experience with online training.
Comparing Requirements vis-à-vis Traditional eLearning

Kern conducted an in-house analysis about the requirements and resources available for the task on-hand vis-à-vis traditional eLearning. The comparison is given below.

Current Project Requirements Traditional eLearning
Purpose
Urgent business needs; had to be rolled out in a short timeframe Difficult to rollout in such a tight timeframe
Timeline Minimal resources (2 for scripting and 3 for development) Requires approximately 3 person months to create an hour of eLearning.(The current project would require 16-20 people to rollout the product in the specified timeframe.)
Costs 20% of the traditional eLearning budget Would involve US$7000-US$10000 per learning hour
SME Availability Client was committed to providing content and help to help meet deadlines SME availability over longer duration becomes a problem

Typical Challenges in Rapid eLearning

Creating rapid eLearning is not an easy task. The typical challenges are listed below:

Ensuring a look and feel that is consistent with traditional eLearning
Using good and effective instructional design principles in a short time frame
Integrating with LMS
Creating detailed and consistent media elements in a short time frame
Integrating the programming and HTML
Providing advanced features such as links, tests, and glossary
Meeting schedules without compromising on quality or learning effectiveness
The challenges faced by Kern while implementing rapid eLearning were:

Tools: Kern had no rapid eLearning tool
Resource: Kern could spare only 5 members for the project
Deadline: Kern had committed to deliver within a deadline of 6 weeks
Quality: Kern had to adhere to quality standards despite the stringent deadline
Budget: Kern had proposed a budget that was 20% of the cost of a traditional course
In short, Kern had the challenge of rolling out an output that would match or surpass the output of a traditional eLearning course at a fraction of the traditional eLearning budget and with minimal resources.

Implementing Rapid eLearning

Kern adopted different strategies to meet these challenges. Let us look at the actions taken by Kern:

Focus on design: Kern first defined the scope, guidelines and workflow for the course. The scope covered the extent and depth of content coverage. The guidelines included the strategies, look and feel, and the level of interactivity. Kern finalized the use of page-level presentation strategies such as tabbed pages, drag and drop, rollover text, click text, checklists, and so on. The standards document specified the rules for the use of fonts, audio, positioning of graphics, course length and slide and frame formats. The workflow outlined the tendering process in the form of a flowchart. The design document and the workflow were signed-off by the client at the beginning of the project. The design team created and finalized the design interface of the course.
Content categorization: To meet the course duration and provide adequate content to the audience, content was categorized and segregated into two parts, main content and additional content. Main content was covered in detail in the course. Additional content was placed in the Reference section of the course. It was included as optional reading at appropriate places. This helped maintain the course duration at 8 hours without resulting in content overload.
Tool used: Kern decided to use PowerPoint to create storyboards. The storyboards were scripted using PowerPoint called wire frames. They had detailed visualization and instructions for the graphics and construction team. The storyboards sent to the client for content validation looked like the real screens of the course. Visualized scripts ensured that there was no additional time spent by instructional designers with the graphics and construction team to clarify graphics and presentation-related doubts.
Parallel processing: The team at Kern worked in parallel. There was no time wasted by either graphics or construction in waiting for inputs from the ID team. Let us see how this happened:
ID team of 2 people worked on the table of content and content categorization; 2 people from the construction team created the shell; graphics person created common icons and graphic elements for the course.
ID team starts scripting using existing templates. The smallest module, module 1 is rolled out in 2 days. The module is passed on to the graphics and construction team. The module is also sent for client feedback. Based on module 1 feedback, other modules are modified and created.
Client feedback is incorporated by one person of the ID team while others continue scripting the other modules. The graphics team creates the icons. Development team is simultaneously working on the shell and integration of module 1.
This synchronized process resulted in the constructed modules being rolled out quickly after the completion of scripting, resulting in successful completion of the project.
Critical Success Factors

Let us summarize the critical success factors for rapid eLearning based on Kern’s experiences:

Ensure all content transfer happens in stage I. We had access to all relevant materials upfront and they were shared with us at the beginning of the course.
Define course guidelines and workflow upfront and share it with all concerned.
Ensure ready availability of SME. Our client was very prompt and clear about the requirements. There was no ambiguity in expectations and the scope of content was also signed-off by the client early in the project. Since the client was also the Subject Matter Expert, it helped close content issues faster.
Use simple tool such as PowerPoint and user-friendly templates to script the course.
The key is team work and project management. Define the team, expectations and schedules from the beginning. Ensure that the team works closely in coordination with the schedules, and timelines are tracked on a daily basis.
Have constant communication with the client on a daily basis about the progress and requirements. "

For more information about Business Skills eLearning, go to the eLearningYellowPages.com directory.

iPhone Impacts Mobile eLearning

The iPhone is coming! Its beautiful! It's the wave of the future, and it is going to have a a major impact on elearning! Many corporations are already using the Blackberry, and many of those same companies are testing or preparing to implement iPods for their employees as learning devices. Soon, for the same price you can now get a device that acts as both...!

PodCasts are becoming a part of elearning already as top tier online colleges and universities offer podcasts to supplement the material offered. In addition, there are some terrific corporate training programs, and self help programs that are now available on podcasts - and they are becoming more and more popular.

Lots of possibilities with the iPhone. Keep watching for more information.

More Companies Using E-Learning for Training

More and more companies are turning to e-learning as a cost effective and convenient method of training employees. E-learning is becoming more popular because it enables employees and their managers to schedule courses around their day.

Rather than hiring a corporate trainer to teach about decision making, for example, employees access the training that they need when it is convenient for them and for the company. While e-learning won't replace conventional classroom training, it is a viable alternative for many types of training and development. Rather than scheduling training seminars and events, virtual training allows companies to continue operations while allowing employees to access courses during the regular business day, according to Dubai-based Xpert Learning director Paul Gledhill. This flexibility is driving the growing popularity of e-learning based training, expecially for multinational companies.

Top tier schools such as the University of Notre Dame and University of Phoenix Online, offer excellent executive training and development courses.

The University of Notre Dame. offers an online Executive Certificate in Negotiation, delivered in three separate and powerful 8-week courses in business negotiation, each containing up to 16 hours of streaming video presentations, independent exercises, and exam, allowing the student to master the art of negotiation online.

The University of Phoenix Online offers professional career development courses in subjects such as Marketing. These Marketing courses generally take about 5 to 6 weeks each to complete. A few of the courses offered include: Buyer Behavior; Integrated Marketing Commmunications; International Marketing; and Product Development.

For those interested in finding more e-learning training and development courses, go to eLearningYellowPages.com.


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