For most companies, building a strong project management discipline is a key priority. Strong project teams help companies to reduce risks, cut costs, deliver on time, and produce results – all important things for any business.

As an employee, taking the time to improve your project management skills can be a great way to boost your career, while making yourself more valuable to employers. What’s more, project management skills are not limited to employees working in a project manager position – they are a set of techniques and tools that can be applied to any role, helping you to achieve goals and manage your workload more effectively.

Whether you’re managing small, relatively simple projects or rolling out complex, large-scale initiatives, a little extra study into project management will go a long way. These five online courses will help you understand and use project management tools and techniques, developing your skill set and building your confidence in this area.

The best place to start? With the fundamentals, of course. Project Management Fundamentals takes you right from the start, so it’s great for anyone who is new to the subject or is keen to start their study from scratch.

This online course explains the basics of project management, covering the following project steps:

Establishing project goals and objectives

You’ll receive plenty of practical tips for how to keep your project on track, manage your project team and report on project performance. You’ll also get an introduction to using the Microsoft Project software, which can help you manage the scope, budget and schedule of your project.

Project Management Life Cycle (PMLC) Simplified for Everyone

This next course is great for providing an overarching explanation of the project life cycle. Understanding the PMLC helps to provide a holistic view of project management, which is really useful for anyone who likes to have that ‘bird’s eye’ view of things.

The Project Management Life Cycle course walks you through each phase of the life cycle:

With each phase, you’ll learn what tools you need and how to use them, providing you with the tools to complete a Business Case, Project Plan, Project Schedule, and Implementation Plan. You’ll feel confident in knowing when to engage your team, how to prepare your schedule, how to create a high-level budget versus a low-level project budget, and much more.

This course is a great way to acquire the knowledge you need to manage a project from beginning to end.

Project Management: How to Manage Project Costs?

Want to focus specifically on the money side of project management?

A large part of project management is knowing how to manage costs, for the duration of the project. To be a successful project manager, you definitely need to know how to keep costs under control and not blow your budget. This is important for projects of all sizes and scope!

This online course does just what it says – teaching you How to Manage Project Costs. The course materials will give you a deep understanding of the cost management aspect of projects, teaching you how to:

Estimate costs required to accomplish project activities

Apply the best tools and methods for cost management

You’ll learn all the best practices of project cost management, with plenty of videos and quizzes throughout the eLearning course to keep you engaged and focused.

Project Management: Time Management for Project Managers

Aside from money, what’s the other precious resource that needs to be closely managed? Time.

While it’s important to know how to manage project costs and budgets, you also need to know how to effectively manage time, to ensure your project stays on track and delivers within the required timeframe.

As a project manager, time can be one of the trickiest things to manage, as there are often delays and interruptions coming from areas that are outside of your direct control. With Time Management for Project Managers, you’ll learn everything you need to know to master effective project time management.

As the course description says, we need to be aware of the “Triple Constraints of Project Management: cost, scope, and time. If any one of these constraints is out of balance with the other two, the project is unlikely to succeed.” This online course will show you how to master schedule management, activity duration, project schedules and more.

We’ll leave you with something a bit different – a snapshot of some cool software tools that you can use to manage your projects.

Choosing a project management tool isn’t as easy and straightforward as it sounds. Usually, the only way to find the right software tool for your project is to sign up to a program, give the free trial a shot, then see how the rest of your project team likes using it. Often you get stuck (or financially locked into!) using a program that isn’t really all that great for your needs, but you don’t have the time or money to look elsewhere.

With Project Management Software Previews, the process of choosing project management software is made easier, as it helps you to find the best fit for your needs.

This online course allows you to watch short videos that give you a window into the top-rated, established project management software systems. You’ll be able to see first-hand what major hosted project management software systems are available, and view the layout of each software system.

This way, you can quickly and easily access the information you need to further evaluate the software for your business, and choose one or two to test with your team. You can even show them the video of the one you like first!

False

Online courses to improve your project management skills

We all love life’s little luxuries, don’t we?

But times change, and what were once luxuries become necessities. That’s the situation today with training for small and medium sized businesses.

Not so long ago, training for SMBs was a luxury that could not be afforded. Small businesses often had to spend most of their time simply keeping their heads above water, and dealing with the day-to-day costs of staying in the game. Highly effective training was just not a realistic option.

And then came the internet. This technological miracle seems to have changed every walk of life - and the business world is no exception. Now, thanks to Cloud-Based Learning Management Systems like Go1 Premium, small and medium-sized businesses can access exemplary training resources at affordable prices in ways that would not have been considered possible only 15 years ago.

So what is a Learning Management System? To put it simply, an LMS is a software application that’s used by businesses to deliver educational courses and training programs to their staff in a logical, efficient, and trackable way. The LMS powers training courses to simplify and automate the handling of this centrally important business practice.

So let’s take a look at some of the benefits that using a Learning Management System to implement your training can offer to owners of small to medium-sized businesses.

Light on the pocket but heavy on satisfaction

The most obvious benefit of LMS for training is its cost-effective nature. Unlike training of old where speakers were flown in at often exorbitant costs, LMS is an efficient and value-for-money method of training up your teams.

For SMBs, it’s vitally important to track and predict costs with great accuracy, as budgets are usually tighter than their larger counterparts. The LMS offers the advantage of a set cost, offering the business a transparent price that won’t spiral out of control.

Yet despite the cost benefits for SMBs, the quality of training provided by an LMS is second-to-none. For example, at Go1 we offer comprehensive professional development that covers areas like sales skills, HR, customer service, or leadership, that has been created by experts in their fields who know the ins and outs of their specific area of business development.

The LMS system brings with it years of experience in handling the very specific needs of small and medium-sized businesses.

Connected to the affordability of LMS training is the improved time efficiency in the implementation of said training, a real boon for small and medium-sized businesses.

Commonly, SMBs don’t have a lot of time to waste as they try to make every working hour a productive one. Though training is a major component of a successful organization, it can easily slip by the wayside in favor of more lucrative pursuits while at work.

The beauty of LMS training is that it can be accessed wherever and whenever, meaning that employees don’t have to waste time traveling to a venue or stopping important pieces of work to head off on a training afternoon. Instead, they’re able to access training as and when it’s practical and logical to do so. As training is provided online, employees can train at home or on the go, saving time for themselves and for the business.

With LMS training, time is streamlined for efficiency so that working hours aren’t wasted.

Before training objectives were easily quantified, tracking the progress of trainers was not an easy task. Often, businesses scratched their heads and questioned what training had really done for them.

But by using a Learning Management System to implement training, businesses can now very easily see how their employees are training, what they should be learning, and in which areas they can improve.

Many of the features of the LMS, such as quizzes and tests, allow HR to verify each employee’s understanding of what they’re being taught. For example, our compliance training will teach and test the comprehension of an employee so that a business is assured of the successful mastering of important regulatory practices and legal restraints.

Onboarding of new employees is also improved through automation of the actual onboarding process, which, like training, can be configured and tracked. From this progress tracking, reports can be produced that detail strengths and weaknesses of each trainer to further enhance the potency of the Learning Management System.

LMS providers are businesses too, and at Go1 we understand the need for ongoing support when making a major business change, such as the application of a new training system.

That’s why one foundation of our organization is in offering ongoing support. We don’t “set it and forget it”; instead we’re with the SMB every step of the way – from planning, to implementation, to review and assessment.

With hundreds of courses that are ready off the shelf, the LMS can provide complete coverage for every aspect of business organization, which can be customized simply and quickly to best fit the needs of your SMB.

LMS training for small and medium businesses is now a formidable and competitive alternative for the training and professional development of your organization. The time to reap its benefits has never been better.


How to provide training for small businesses

We all know how this scenario goes: you’ve just got into the perfect work zone, feeling 100% inspired and focused, when your alarm goes off to advise of a team meeting. By the time you get back to your desk and regain concentration, it’s only to have it broken by yet another meeting. Frustrating, right?

Many office workers know the sense of frustration that can come from too many meetings – especially when those meetings often feel pointless, disorganised or counterproductive. And when your calendar is constantly booked out with back-to-back meetings, whether virtual or in-person, it becomes very hard to find the time to carry out all those tasks discussed at meetings!

That’s why it’s so important to make every single meeting as productive, engaging and efficient as possible. Because unfortunately, while meetings are supposed to help improve your team’s business operations, productivity and collaboration, they can actually do the opposite.

Do you really need to accept every meeting?

The first thing this course highlights is something called ‘Mindless Accept Syndrome.’ Most of us are in the habit of just accepting a meeting invitation the minute it pops up in our inbox or calendar – even when we don’t really know what it’s about or how we can add value.

But do you really need to accept every meeting invite that comes your way? In his well-known TED talk, speaker David Grady discusses the “epidemic of bad, inefficient, overcrowded meetings [that] is plaguing the world’s businesses and making workers miserable.”

According to Grady, Mindless Accept Syndrome occurs when employees automatically accept meeting invitations – without agendas, without clarity of purpose, without knowing why they have been selected to attend and not knowing what they are expected to contribute nor to achieve.

Throughout the course, you’ll learn how to change this behaviour, by proactively questioning and considering each meeting invite that comes your way.

The different types of personalities you meet in meetings

The Making Meetings Matter course also looks at some of the types of workers we can regularly come across in meetings, who may be (consciously or sub-consciously) contributing to counterproductive meetings.

We’ve all dealt with someone who likes to dominate every meeting, even when they’re not chairperson. Or the person who rambles on and on, making each meeting run overtime. Even the workplace joker can derail a productive meeting.

It’s good to be aware that even colleagues who are super nice people can often act out in negative ways during meetings. This is probably because they feel that their time is being wasted, they have deadlines and pressures back at their desk, and it all leaves them in a less than fantastic mood.

Through the course, you’ll learn how to manage these different types of personalities, with helpful advice for bringing meetings back on track.

Practical tips for designing and chairing meetings

Last, but not least, you’ll also learn practical tips for designing and leading workplace meetings. Meetings without structure are in danger of going on forever, and often employees will leave wondering why they were even present.

Setting an agenda – a simple meeting agenda, distributed in advance, is perhaps the most important tool in ensuring a successful productive meeting

Meeting ground rules – stop people displaying disruptive behaviours in meetings, get the group to agree on ground rules about how your meetings will be run

Roles and responsibilities – ensure that everyone involved is crystal clear on their roles and the associated responsibilities of those roles

Action and follow-up – agree on tasks (action items) that should be carried out, with clear deliverables and due dates for individuals

With your new Meeting Tool Kit, you’ll also discover some of the best meeting management tools you can use in the real world.

Soon, by changing the way meetings are designed, lead and experienced, you’ll be enhancing your team’s productivity and engagement, while cutting down on pointless, frustrating meeting time. You might even make workplace meetings fun, and something that staff can look forward to!


When it comes to employee training, startups tend to do things a bit differently from large-scale corporations. Working with smaller teams, lower budgets and limited time can bring unique challenges to small businesses. And while a lot of time and money goes into finding the right hires, unfortunately the investment in people can often stop there.

For some startups, employee training can quickly take a backseat, as funds are invested in other directions. Falon Fatemi, CEO and founder of Node, says that her time advising and running startups has led her to believe that “most startups don’t do enough learning.”

“It’s not that their employees don’t want to learn, though; it’s that learning often takes a backseat to productivity in the early days,” she says.

In startup land, it can often be all hands on deck, with everyone pitching in to get things done. Employees can find themselves wearing multiple hats and juggling different responsibilities, making the work environment exciting, challenging and great for expanding your skill set.

But it’s important for startups and small business owners to see the value in providing proper training programs for staff. The ongoing development of your people should be an essential part of any startup – for the growth of your business, as well as your employees.

These days, the cost of employee training doesn’t need to be a barrier to professional development, with so many ways to deliver valuable training that’s relevant to all roles and industries.

Let’s look at the reasons why employee training and development is so important for startups. And how you can use eLearning to deliver an effective and well-structured training program for your team.

To Attract and Retain High-Performing Employees

As we said, significant effort goes into securing the right people for your company – regardless of size. The costs of hiring, onboarding and training up a new team member will quickly add up. So you want to make sure you’re not having to do this all the time!

Avoid these costs from blowing out by reducing your staff turnover rate. A formal training program will work as a great retention tool, with well-trained employees being far more likely to stick around.

So while you may think that committing to a training program is more expensive, it will actually save you in the long run.

Training programs also build loyalty within your employees, as you’ll be showing staff that you’re committed to their career development. Having loyal team members is just as important as having loyal customers!

almost a quarter of Millennials find a lack of company support for development as the most surprising part of real-world employment

 31% said they’d sought their own on-the-job training.

 88% expressed a willingness to invest in their own training and development

Employees, particularly younger workers, want to be trained and developed. And they want to feel a bond and connection with the company they work for. These are the best people to promote your products and services, so it’s worthwhile investing in building that loyalty.

To Share Knowledge and Create a Culture of Learning


Another reason why training is so important is to facilitate knowledge sharing within your startup.

Like any business, you don’t want key knowledge to leave when certain staff members do. Without knowledge sharing, there’s a serious risk of that happening, as employees move on from the organisation, taking their knowledge with them. You want to promote a culture of learning and knowledge sharing, to make sure you’re tapping into those precious resources of varied skills and experience.

Encouraging team members to share information and knowledge freely helps to foster a sense of community and a collaborative work culture – which are important for the culture of any startup. It also means that when it comes time to hire new leaders, there’s a good chance you’ve already invested time and money into training one up – from within your own company!

So let’s look at how you can start formalising a proper training program for your staff. One of the most popular and cost-effective ways to deliver effective employee training is through online learning.

It’s easy to see why more organisations, from SMBs to large multinationals, are making the switch to eLearning for staff training needs. With so many training options available online, you can choose from online courses, MOOCs, podcasts and webinars, all developed by experts and professionals in their fields.

This presents endless exciting ways to train staff, giving “startups an opportunity to offer training in fresh, innovative ways that leverage the technology we’ve all come to rely on for efficiency and convenience.”

Even if you lack the physical space or funds to host live training, you can have employees complete their training from home or at their desk – which is usually more convenient for them anyway. And with eLearning, you won’t need to take staff members away from their roles to deliver training. When you have less employees on deck, the less interruptions to business operations the better!

With online training, you can also use the material over-and-over again, delivering training to individual team members or small groups of employees as many times as they need. Updating online course materials is quick and easy, without the costs associated with print materials.

Are you seeing the value in providing proper training and development for your staff? Get started on a new online training program for your team.

Why employee training is important for startups

With the new financial year underway, this is an ideal time for setting fresh goals and objectives for your business. It’s not just an important reminder to pay attention to company finances – this time of year is also a good opportunity to look at your business processes and see what improvements can be made.

Setting the right goals and establishing priorities will help you make sure you’re achieving the business growth you need. Before you do this, there should be one goal that’s top of your priority list – and that’s employee training.

In business, we often think about things as ‘must haves’ or ‘nice to haves.’ When money is tight, it’s not uncommon to scrap the ‘nice to haves’ to focus our resources on the essentials. Unfortunately, employee training programs often fall by the wayside during these low times. In fact, corporate training can be quite a good indicator of how a company is tracking – when business is slow, organisations can be seen making cuts to their staff training programs, only to increase training spending when business picks up again.

But there are many reasons why staff training should always be a ‘must have.’ By making training top priority, you’ll see improvements in employee performance, productivity and job satisfaction – all things that will bring positive results for your business and bottom line. It’s also critical for keeping up-to-date with workplace compliance requirements, which are more important than ever right now.

Let’s take a look at each of these things in turn, so you can see why you should be making training a top priority for the new financial year.

Help Staff Improve their Productivity, Performance and KPIs 

The most obvious benefit of investing in training is the improvement of employee skills. Learning is absolutely essential to make sure each person has the skills and knowledge they need to do their job – and this development needs to be continual and ongoing.

Training will help bridge the skills gap in your organisation, reducing any mismatch that exists between the skills that you need for your business, and the skills that your employees actually have. With ongoing training, you can make sure staff are equipped to deal with any changes in technology and the industry, while continually improving their skill sets and contributing to the success of the company.

How do you know whether your L&D spending is paying off? KPIs will evaluate individual employee performance and see how well each team member is tracking in terms of productivity and performance. And you should be measuring the impact training has on your employees and organisation, to see if it’s a worthwhile investment. Read our previous article on Measuring the Impact of Employee Training to learn how you can use Kirkpatrick’s evaluation method to identify benefits, reducing them to clear figures and numbers.

Training Helps to Attract and Retain Talent


By making training a top priority, you’ll also have a far greater chance of attracting and retaining good employees. Modern workers are much more likely to stay with a company if they know there’s been an investment in their professional development.

These days, people also pay close attention to the work culture offered by organisations. They want to work for a company that is a good fit for them, as much as they’re a good fit for the company. They’ll be more motivated to choose your organisation if they know you’ll be supportive in their career development. In fact, younger generations now expect employers to have this commitment to their staff.

So if you’ve got high-performing staff, you need to show them that you’re willing to invest time and money into their training – or they may move on. You might think you’re saving money by not spending on L&D, but having a high staff turnover rate can end up being even more expensive.

Reduce Organisational Risk with Compliance Training 

Last, but not least, there’s a very serious reason why you should be focusing your attention on training – and that’s compliance.

Whether you’re running a small business or managing a large global company, being compliant is simply part of doing business. Neglecting to take it seriously can result in fines, penalties, expensive court cases and the subsequent loss of income and reputation. As we said before when talking about creating a culture of compliance, organisations “with high levels of integrity and ethics can be seen to have higher productivity, profitability, employee engagement and overall risk reduction. Compliance plays a big role in that.

Through training, you can make sure each employee of your company is up-to-date with organisational policies and procedures. Compliance training will also help them know how to recognise and respond to issues in the workplace – whether it’s sexual harassment, bullying, data management or a ransomware attack.

Just last week, we published an article on the importance of reducing your compliance risk ahead of changes to data breach laws. For Australian businesses, compliance training is absolutely imperative, as you could be at risk of paying civil penalties of an amount up to $1.8 million if non-compliant in this area.

When you put it all together – employee performance, talent retention, compliance – you can see the clear benefits of staff learning and development. This month, as you move into the new financial year, look at your investment in employee training. And make it a top priority for the year ahead.

Make training your top goal for the new financial year

Following on from our recent article about professional development courses, we thought we’d give you some more great online training materials to help your team grow.

Something that we haven’t quite touched on yet is the need for professional development training to be continual – it’s not just something that you should tick off once a year to satisfy HR. It requires ongoing investment of your time, focus and energy, to get the best results.

Why? Because when you’re continually learning, you know that you’re always growing as a professional. And if you’re a manager, you should also be helping your employees to grow, and acquire the skills and knowledge they need to succeed.

Making the commitment to check in with employees and set new goals is easy. The real challenge is getting them excited about their own professional development. That’s where these online courses come into the equation. We’ve hand-picked 5 short courses that we think will help get your team on board with online learning. They’re fresh, well-presented and easy to understand, with engaging content and delivery methods.

You and your team will explore decision making, branding, customer feedback and more. Without further ado, here they are!

Most of us work in teams, whether it’s in the office or on the sales floor. So when it comes to professional development, improving your skills as a team player is pretty much top of the list.

One of the challenges faced by many employees is knowing how to make decisions as part of a team. But when your decisions can have a positive or negative impact on other people, it’s important to get this right.

This first course will help you to understand effective decision making and the benefits of team collaboration. Making decisions as a team player creates a sense of empowerment and ownership, while also working to drive group motivation, creativity and innovation. As a manager, you’ll hopefully see an increase in team cohesion, and a reduction in individual stress levels for your employees as a result of that.

In the last course, we looked at team dynamics – now it’s time to take a good long look at yourself. What kind of image are you conveying at work? Like it or not, when it comes to your career, there’s something to be said for paying attention to your own personal brand.

This eLearning course will help you to better understand your brand. You’ll work through the steps of building your personal brand and communicating it to others, creating your own unique Personal Branding Statements and Leadership Profile. You’ll learn more about your core values and what you stand for, and how this has an impact on what people feel your brand represents.

There’s no question about the impact great customer service has on an organisation. And knowing how to successfully manage customer feedback is one of the best skills you can have as an employee.

This doesn’t just apply to people working in retail or hospitality roles. Your customers can also be internal, and it’s just as important to keep internal stakeholders or clients happy as it is with any customer base. You want to create an environment that welcomes customer feedback – even if it’s negative! Because as the course content reminds us, Bill Gates once said, “your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

This course will educate your team on how to handle feedback and use it to provide a better customer experience.

Developing a Strategy for Customer Complaints

Employees will also learn how to predict potential issues before they arise, helping them to feel more empowered in their roles.

Another valuable skill that is critical for professional developing is knowing how to manage team conflict.

Many people naturally tend to shy away from difficult conversations or conflict – if that’s you, you’re not alone! But unfortunately, avoiding conflict won’t make it go away. If anything, it will only make it worse, as negative emotions continue to boil under the surface and grow larger in magnitude.

When members of a team are in conflict, it can also begin to affect their other team mates, causing rifts and division and resulting in a toxic work culture. This eLearning course gets to the bottom of this, suggesting practical ways you can tackle conflict head on and tips for how to communicate and restore balance.

How to Create their 'Walk in the Door' Moments

While the above title might sound a little cryptic at first, this course is all about creating a positive work environment for yourself and your team.

It asks the big and important questions: “Why do you walk in the door every day?” “What motivates you in your workplace?” “What makes you want to be there?”

This course shows you how to create a culture of wellbeing in your workplace. You’ll learn how job satisfaction is closely linked to productivity, making it a vital part of career development. And you’ll explore ways to create and maintain a space that inspires and motivates team members to higher levels of performance and commitment.

While this course is part of the Learoy Tonight Leadership series, it’s useful for employees of all levels who are keen to work towards a better workplace for themselves and their colleagues. Your team members will get just as much out of the course materials, helping them get excited about professional development and online learning.

Help your team grow with professional development training

All successful digital learning projects start with a first class plan. But, it’s easy to launch head first into creating learning content, without properly laying the foundations and understanding what success will look like.

The digital learning authors that invest a couple of hours in understanding their objectives and audience at the start of a project tend to get better results, much quicker. And those that prototype, test and iterate their ideas do even better.

What are the crucial steps to more successful elearning?

Taking the time to plan at the start of your project and reflect and refine throughout, will help make sure your learning hits the mark. There are various frameworks for elearning, that set out approaches to doing this. The 5C Framework is the new kid on the block and can be seen as a modern, more agile alternative to the ADDIE framework. 

4 crucial “Capture” questions to ask yourself at the start of your elearning project:

Who are your audience and what changes do you want them to make?

What does the digital learning need to do to help them with this change?

What resources do you have at your disposal to make your project a success?

Download this free “Capture Needs Template” to help with this.

Tips for nailing the “Capture” stage of the 5C Framework

Make time – block out 60 minutes for this planning, you’ll save this time later on and reach your goals faster.

Work collaboratively – bring your colleagues into the conversation about your project goals and audience needs. As they say, two heads (or more!) are better than one.

Ask your audience – if you’re unclear of what your learner needs actually are, or want to know what they would find engaging…ask them. If you use Elucidat, create a survey to send out to a small sample to get their feedback.

Print out and use the Capture Needs template – this will speed up your planning process and will guide you through the key questions to reflect on.

 Want to know more about the 5C Framework? Learn more here.

Kirstie is an experienced learning design and performance enhancement specialist at Elucidat. She has a passion for bringing about high impact, emotionally engaging digital and blended experiences that make an actual difference.

How to plan a more successful elearning project

One of the most important characteristics of great leaders is their ability to set clear paths for their teams, leading the way forward with direction and purpose. In fact, this strong sense of direction is not just desirable in leadership roles – it’s critical for the success of any business.

So what do we mean when we talk about direction, in an organisational context? It’s easy to pull out words like mission, vision and values, but what does it all mean when you really get down to it?

Well, when we’re talking about direction we’re talking about knowing:

And your company’s mission, vision and values are an incredibly important part of getting there! Establishing these things are what will help you establish a clear direction, setting your business up for success and giving your team purpose.

Let’s look closer at how leaders can set the direction of their organisation and drive positive outcomes for their team. And how you can strengthen your own sense of direction as a leader.

The Importance of Clear Direction for Employees 

As we said above, your organisation's mission, vision and values are all central to creating the direction (and potential success) of your business.

If you’re in a management or team leader role, you have the opportunity to create a more purpose-focused culture for your employees. When each individual team member knows what they are working towards, and how they fit into the big picture, they have a much stronger sense of being valued. This helps to create a more positive work culture and leads to higher levels of productivity and performance – happy employees, happy business!

As a leader, it’s important that you define and communicate this ‘big picture’ concept to your team, so that they know how their work fits into the organisation’s goals and mission. Ask yourself (and be honest) how many of your team members actually know the company’s vision and values – would they even know where to find this information?

If you’re eager to get your team back on track and moving forward in a more positive direction, you can get the ball rolling by working on your own leadership skills.

The online course, How to Succeed Through Direction, is a great place to start. With this short eLearning course, running for approximately 30 to 45 minutes, you’ll gain a wealth of leadership knowledge in less than an hour.

Through videos, interviews and presentations from experts, you’ll understand more about the importance of company mission, vision and values. You’ll learn how to:

Drive the organisation’s mission, vision and values

Know your values and align them to your business

Use mission, vision and values to support your team and culture

Identify how you measure and build your business beyond the bottom line

Feel confident in your ability to paint the ‘big picture’ for your team

The course will also provide you with invaluable tips for leveraging your clarity on direction and behaviour to further drive your culture. As the Learoy team says, if you feel like your team needs a GPS to get back on track, “make the mission clear by figuring out a direction – then, get everyone on board!”

Online Courses to Increase Your Leadership Skills

You may have also seen our recent article on how to choose the best learning environments for your team?

Both of these eLearning courses are part of the Leadership – Off the Leash journey, developed by the Learoy Tonight team and created specifically for today’s managers and leaders.

With the sheer number of online training courses now available, you might think they all start to look the same.

But the differences can be profound - especially in the case of corporate and academic training.

The clearest way that online training and eLearning platforms differentiate corporate and academic training is in their intentions.

Speaking generally, corporate training is intended to teach students skills that will improve their performance in their work lives. Corporate training is often requested by businesses who are looking to educate their employees on contemporary issues within their industry.

Academic training has different goals. Academic training is usually sought after by individuals who want to gain knowledge, and often qualifications, in a chosen field. It’s all about learning and increasing knowledge. Sometimes a student intends to use their new knowledge in their career, and sometimes they don’t. Education for education’s sake is as much as a reason as any.

So when choosing corporate or academic training, you need to know the differences between the two. Luckily, that’s what we’re about to do!

Corporate training: what can be expected?

The corporate world doesn’t have time to wait around. Business moves incredibly quickly and every competitor in the market needs to keep up or lose out.

It’s for this reason that corporate training tends to hold the quick fix above the life-long learning model; the corporate environment changes so rapidly that processes and ways of working are constantly be revolutionized. This is what molds the corporate training model, and it’s the reason for corporate eLearning courses to be structured in this particular way. Short and sharp, that’s the ticket!

Specialization: Most jobs don’t require workers to take on a wide range of tasks. In fact, with ‘hyper specialization’ of the workforce, jobs are becoming ever more specialized. This is why eLearning platforms offer such specific courses – so that the requirements of specialized labor are met!

You’re unlikely to find much fluff in online corporate courses because it’s a waste of both time and effort. It’s not what they’re for!

The goal behind corporate training can be thought of as teaching the specialized, essential information so that an employee can perform their job well. That’s the reason they’re taking the course, after all.

Rapidly changing and dynamic: Due to the incredible pace of the business world, there is a constant flow of training courses to educate employees on the changes going on around them.

For example, compliance frameworks governing the way an organization stores data changes frequently as potential online threats come and go, or technology evolves. It’s really important, therefore, to make sure that compliance is adhered to. And to do this, employees have to be educated on the changing sands in their industry.

eLearning courses are able to react quickly to changes within an industry, making them the ideal tool for corporate training.

Practical: Perhaps the most important difference between academic and corporate training is the corporate training’s focus on the practical use of skills. For a business, there is little point learning a skill if it isn’t then put to use. What a student learning in a corporate training course is to improve their work performance.