In a previous article, I wrote about how to create the basis of a culture of innovation in organizations. Here, I will put a few management concepts and practices that are effective in actually fostering that culture. 

The first one is Empowerment. A buzzword from decades ago, but still vital for an innovative organization. People must be given space and authority for testing and implementing their ideas without many hoops to go through. Empowerment is based on the idea that giving employees training, resources, authority, opportunity, motivation, as well holding them responsible and accountable for outcomes of their actions, will contribute to their competence, satisfaction and contribution. A good example of empowerment is Google's famous 20% time. Although the actual implementation of 20% time at Google is open for interpretation, people there are indeed free to create personal projects, gather contributors and team members from other departments and are encouraged to present it to other people for support and possible approval. It is said that Google News, Google’s autocomplete system, Gmail and AdSense, the advertising engine developed to support Gmail financially - now producing roughly a quarter of Google’s revenue - are examples of projects that span out of the empowerment that the 20% time policy gives to employees.

Related to the Empowerment concept, having a Project-based Approach to initiatives in the organization makes a big difference. Innovative organisations allow for every person, no matter their position, background or term of employment, to be a project leader. They allow for these people, when they present an idea, to lead their projects and assemble a team of interested people from any department in the company. When an initiative needs to be implemented, good leaders often select people who had the idea, or who will be impacted the most by the initiative, as the project leader. The organisational leaders then coach the project leaders into developing themselves, working in teams, being accountable and having them learn how to implement an initiative. This creates a culture of people wanting to implement improvements as a way to be noticed and grow in the organisation. It also opens interdepartmental communication. A project-based approach needs to be coupled with a proper structure for accountability, such as weekly or monthly project progress meetings. 

All initiatives, no matter how small they are, can benefit from a project-based approach, with a leader, team involved, and proper accountability. Some care must be taken not to stiff everything with long project plans in MS Project or other time-hungry practices for small projects. Things must be practical, especially for small projects or initiatives.

An innovative organization must be often reassessing its situation and be willing to see reality as it is so they can change and implement improvements sooner rather than later. There are several management tools that help leaders and managers to reassess their organisation. A favourite and very effective one is the SWOT analysis. The Organisational Culture and Climate Survey is another tool. So as Strategic meetings, especially if they include the participation of people from different departments and levels of the organisation. Inviting different employees to strategic meetings is something that promotes inclusion and transparency, as well as incentivizing new ideas and suggestions. Very transparent companies post in their internal social networks or intranets what they have been discussing in strategic meetings and encourage their employees to comment on it. Another tool to get a good pulse of the state of the organization, as well as new ideas, is to have an anonymous suggestion/feedback box (online and/or offline). Your employees, clients, suppliers and partners need to have an open channel to say what they want without the fear of retaliation. 

Having an open mindset and recognizing your shortfalls is also vital for an innovative organization. For many times, I have seen leaders simply not willing to accept their shortfalls or unable to accept problems in their companies. Recognising problems is the first step in fixing them. Some leaders reason that by recognising their problems they will spread negativity or show weakness to their employees, and thus will lose support or their leadership leverage. That is wrong. HOW you recognise your problems is what makes the difference. Yes, if you recognise a problem and show yourself defeated, you will lose leadership points. However, if a leader does not recognise a shortfall that is obvious to many people in the company, the leader will come out as unrealistic and sometimes arrogant. This also closes avenues for discussion of the problem and blocks innovation. Openly discussing problems allow for more people to suggest ideas on how to fix them. The most appropriate response to a real problem, especially one backed by data or understood by many people in the organisation, is for the leader to recognise it, prioritise it and create initiatives for overcoming it, always keeping an optmist outlook on things. Honest recognition is of utmost importance and so is the follow up with initiatives, with optimism, until it is fixed.

Another important practice is to promote inter-departmental or inter-team interactions. As per Steven Johnson's TED talk, Where good ideas come from, good ideas come from interaction of people from different backgrounds and experiences, in an environment that promotes free flow of information and ideas. Some very innovative companies go to the point of designing their office buildings in a way that will promote frequent informal meetings and gatherings of people from different teams in a manner that they can expose their challenges and data and others can help out with comments. Having a central meal place with long tables is something that can spark some conversations. Frequent company parties or happy hours is another example. Company getaways have the added benefit to promote team building as well as the exchange of ideas. Formal meetings are also beneficial, as long as these are properly facilitated and people from different teams are present and encouraged to participate and to contribute.

Another concept that needs to be placed here is the fact that people need to rest to be able to have good ideas. "Stress is a well known creativity killer" says psychologist Robert Epstein, PhD, in the American Psychological Association magazine. It is common in our days to reward extended hours of hard work. However, we often forget that time off is essential to finding better solutions to hard problems. Well deserved rest and leave time often not only charge people's internal batteries but also create sparks of many new ideas. They allows people to rest and observe the work situations and challenges from a higher, broader point of view. People often have game-changing ideas when they are on a leave and come back with the energy to implement them.

The next concept that has proved to foster innovation in organizations is the application of the lean startup concept into the workplace. This, however, deserves in its own article, that you will find here soon.

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Management practices that foster innovation

Welcome to Part 1 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In this part of our Master Class with Steve we are going to be talking about Why ongoing learning is Important. Due to Steve's experience in the Army and in business, he has been involved in a number of programs with very different approaches to training and provides us with some great insight into how you should set up your team training programs.  During this weeks discussion we will be covering areas like keeping your team happy and motivated to give their best performance, improving processes and deviating from manuals.

"So why is training important? Training is vitally important, businesses are made up of people. The Best businesses are made up of the best people, but even the best people have to know what to do day to day. And if you're a founder or manager, it's probably behold on you to give your employees the most valuable feeling that you possibly can. Not only does it make business sense, but it's just a nice thing to do and a better work environment."

"I'm a huge fan of training. I'm a huge fan of manuals and procedures. That doesn't mean you should blindly follow your training, or blindly follow a manual or procedure, but you need to give your staff the empowerment where if the manual is wrong, change it and make it correct. They should never receive permission to blindly go off and do something wrong because it's written down. I'm a big fan of training, big fan of manuals. I spent my first nine years as a regular soldier and they were quite big on training and manuals and that's rubbed off a bit."

If you'd like to find out more about Steve and what you will be learning in the Master Class you can watch his introduction video HERE.

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into Steve Baxter on Ideas

To learn some more about why ongoing to learning is important, you can also have a look at this fantastic video from Wofford College president Ben Dunlap as he tells the story of Sandor Teszler, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who taught him about passionate living and lifelong learning.

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 1: why ongoing learning is important

Every organisation is desperate to be innovative these days. The threat of being killed by a young disruptive startup looms at almost every industry, from taxi to recruiting, from accommodation to accounting and so on. Yet, uncountable directives to be innovative coming from the top fail. Many times, large budgets are allocated to fuel innovation-related projects and little is actually accomplished. The quest to be innovative has many misconceptions and extreme challenges, both for large organizations and for smaller ones.

No matter what initiatives have been taken, the first and most important change that has to take place at an organisation that seeks to be innovative, is in its culture. This is easier said than done.

The change and championing of a desired Culture and Core Values has to come from the top. If the top is not aligned to the desired values and not willing to take the necessary actions to see them lived in the culture, your organisation will not be an innovative one and that is it. It might have some springs of innovation here and there, but they will eventually die and the organisation will not evolve well into the future. If you are at the top and reading this article, great, you have the right mindset. If you are not at the top, your first order of action is to make sure you or someone you know can influence and, ultimately, get the culture change buy-in (and true championing) from the top.

Considering that the top is won, a few things need to take place.

The first one is that your organisation needs to properly define the core values that will drive the culture you want it to have. Most of the time, core values are already defined and are known, but they are not really followed or championed. For core values to really drive company culture, they need to be lived by and championed by the leadership. That is why the top needs to be fully into this change.

When you are defining or reviewing your organizational values, make sure the basic ones needed for innovation are somehow listed among them. They are:


Open and honest communication. Ideas feed and grow from each other. It is a condition of their evolution into something successful (Check out the TED talk from Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From below). Additionally, people need to be able to safely expose their real problems and challenges, so that others can jump in with new ideas to help them out. Tools and initiatives need to be in place for people from different departments, business units, backgrounds and interests to talk to each other and contribute mutually in a frequent and effortless manner.

People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web.

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from

Accepting and driving change. A large amount of excellent ideas will make no difference in an organisation if the environment does not accept change. People who are change-averse or who are "Devil's advocates" too often need to change or leave. In an innovative organization, there is no space for people constantly putting blocks on new initiatives (check the concept of Lean Startup if costs are of your concern). When hiring, it is important to make a good effort to identify people who will have a natural role of internal entrepreneurs ("intrapreneurs"). People with initiative must be recognized, no matter if they fail. An environment that facilitates experimentation and rewards action is also essential for innovation.

Selflessness and Teamwork, or something aimed at restricting egos that clog the innovation arteries. People who fight to keep ownership of an idea will hurt the innovation process. Ideas need to change and evolve, and this can only be done in a team environment, with people of all types and backgrounds contributing to ideas and mutating them into something better and better. Ideas need to be experimented and, if needed, abandoned, radically changed or even 'pivoted'. It is all part of the process of achieving innovation and whoever holds on to an obsolete idea only to get the credit of it, will damage the organisation and the innovation culture. Ideas are just the seed. Successful implementation and follow through is what really matters.

Continuous Learning. Learning and innovation walk hands in hands. People can only be innovative if they have a diversity of background information and knowledge to build ideas upon. As mentioned, ideas feed and grow from each other. All great minds stood on shoulder of giants. They all studied and acquired previous knowledge of a variety of their predecessors to be able to stitch concepts together, add their own experience, put a spin on it, and come up with a new concept. Knowledge, especially a good diversity of it, is essential to Innovation. Exposure of new concepts, due to continuous learning, always sparks new ideas in people's minds.

Courage to stand up for the organizational values and to withstand possible failure of initiatives. If people, and specially leaders, drop their energy and courage in standing up for the organisational values, the whole effort is doomed. It is everyone's responsibilities to remind each other and their leaders when the core values are not being followed. Innovation needs to be core to the culture, and the championing of the core values are central to the development of that culture.

How to actually make these values come to life in an organization is a matter of another article (and possible course), but here are a few ideas on the topic:

Most of the time, leaders define those core values and try to champion them but what usually happens is that they are often unable to grasp how aligned the organisation is to their core values and what to do about the possible lack of alignment. This blindness usually happens due too many levels of hierarchy, or sometimes by the leader's own inability to grasp the reality, or even due to the lack of tools and data to expose what is actually happening in the organisation. There is a blindness to how people are actually behaving and what is the actual alignment of the organisation to the desired core values. Organisations and their leaders usually lack the ability to see what the culture really is at the moment.

A good, properly mounted and applied Organisational Culture and Climate Survey can answer those questions and expose any incongruence between the desired culture and the actual one. I'll not go into details on how to create one here but if you want to know more about it, please click on this link and vote for the creation of an article or an online course on the topic.

Another matter of importance for creating an innovative organisation, is to have tools and practices at hand that enable leaders to live and apply those values in the workplace. I'll cover this in a following article. Check it out soon here.

Hello and welcome to our very first Master Class!

We are very excited to be introducing our Master Class series, and can't wait to share some great stories and advice from some of the greatest minds in the startup world. Each of our Master Class series will consist of a five part interview covering a range of topics relating to our interviewee, with a different topic released each week.

Our first Master Class is with Steve Baxter. Steve is one of Australia’s most successful tech entrepreneurs, and an active investor and mentor to startups. Steve is an active supporter of Australia’s and Queensland’s startup eco-system, as a founding board member of advocacy group StartupAUS, the founder of Brisbane co-working community River City Labs, and the mission leader for Startup Catalyst. You might also recognize him from his role as a 'Shark' on the television show Shark Tank.

Find out more about Steve and what you will be learning in the Master Class here:

Over the coming weeks our Master Class topics with Steve include:

Why Startups and New Businesses are Critical

The new year is here, and it's the perfect time to start learning something new. At Go1 we have been busy making sure you can kick off your 2016 in style by providing a whole heap of new courses on a range of topics that are free for all of our users!

There are now 70+ courses available for free in our Marketplace covering a huge range of topics from Creating an Awesome User Experience, all the way through to Breaking Bad News. There's something for everyone, so start your year off the right way by learning something new!

Marketplace courses are available to all Go1 users for free by logging into your account and clicking on the Marketplace button on the LMS Menu on the left hand side of the screen as shown below. If you don't already have an account, you can sign up for free HERE and start enrolling into courses.

With all of these courses ready for you, we have picked out our Top 10 new courses for you have a look at:

The Art of Being Heard
People who get heard are people who have something worthwhile to say and who have also developed other important skills as well. On the other hand, some of the quietest people around are known among their colleagues as great communicators. Why is that? This two-module course explores the connection between speaking and listening, and provides some commonsense guidelines for becoming a better communicator. A short quiz follows the first module and second module.

Breaking Bad News
This is a course on how to break bad news to people using the SPIKES technique, which is commonly used or taught to doctors in breaking bad news to patients. When telling anyone any form of bad news, whether it be telling them of a serious medical condition or telling a customer about a serious problem that affects them personally or their business, having a methodical approach is highly important.

Using Social Media to Build Brand Loyalty
Social media is such an integral part of most people’s lives that it’s now vital that all businesses have a social media presence. It is no longer enough to just have a website; businesses must also choose several social media platforms and use them to engage with their customers and provide customer support, thereby building brand loyalty. Incorporating a range of video material, summary notes and links to further reading, this course provides an introduction to social media marketing and offers some guidelines about social media etiquette.

Creating an Awesome User Experience
What if every interaction you have had with a client was publicly listed on social media? It’s a scary thought right? Your every word for the world to see! Well to be honest, this isn’t too far from the truth. Social media is defining how companies interact with their clientele more and more and it is proving to be very powerful in making or breaking a company. In this course, you can learn how to harness the experience your client is receiving and turn them into a promoter of your company.

How to Master Public Speaking
Many people would rather die than stand in front of a microphone. It doesn’t have to be that way. This brief course will show that anyone can become a polished public speaker with practice. We've designed it for the person who wants to feel confident while powerfully delivering a message to any audience, large or small.

Recording an Instructional Video via Webcam
Want to learn how to record a professional looking video with only your laptop and phone? This course will teach you some baisc tricks on how to use your webcam and voice recorder to produce a professional quality video!

Managing Workplace Discrimination
Of all the people issues faced by managers, harassment and discrimination are probably the most common. There are numerous pitfalls associated with managing these issues and because managers are generally unaware of their responsibilities, they run a very real risk of finding themselves in very hot water when situations of harassment and discrimination occur. The purpose of this course is to provide managers with the critical information they need in order to deal effectively with the potential threat of harassment and discrimination in their day to day work activities, avoid claims of discriminatory harassment, and maintain a productive work environment.

The Fundamentals of Effective Teamwork
While everyone knows that business success is the result of collective team effort, it's not always easy to identify exactly why some teams work better together than others. This course takes a fresh look at team dynamics and offers new insights into the behaviours which characterise effective team work.

How to Build a Business Model for a Startup Company
The failure rate for startups is extremely high; by some estimates, 80% to 90% of all startups end up closing their doors. One of the ways you can increase the probability of your startup succeeding is to develop a business model at the outset, before writing a business plan. This course will teach you how to build a business model for your startup, why you need to develop one before writing a business plan, and how to build and develop a strong customer base.

Conflict Resolution in the Workplace
If you work in an office you’ll know what it’s like to butt heads with a colleague, or worse a superior. Some level of conflict is pretty much inevitable when personalities and egos collide but the realities of the workplace often feed the flame. This three-module course is aimed at helping you make sense of the irritation you often feel, understand how most interpersonal workplace conflicts can be relatively easily remedied, and appreciate the perils of unresolved conflict. For those sometimes unavoidable moments when conflict erupts into outright confrontation, the closing module offers strategies you can use to defuse the situation – or at least escape unharmed, both physically and in terms of the law.

Kick off 2016 with one of our new Marketplace courses!

Starting a new job can be a traumatic experience, even for the most experienced campaigners. It's everything from a new office location, to new responsibilities, and not to mention stepping outside of your comfort zone and having to prove yourself to an entire new group of people. While these might sound like horrible things, they are actually some of the best things for people to experience.

A new job is a fresh start and a chance to develop your career in an exciting new way! So it always amazes me when companies don't seize the opportunity to harness this energy and put their new hires through dragged out and boring onboarding programs that can last weeks. This is a surefire way to slowly suck all of that positive energy out of new team members and you will notices a shift in their attitude within a matter of days.

We've all been there before. Day one of your new job, you arrive at the office where you are promptly introduced to a handful of your new teammates, a few whose names you manage to remember, then it's off to HR where you will spend the day reading through document after document to learn more about your role and the company. But it doesn't need to be like this.

The days of having weighty documents printed out to read through are over!

Onboarding new staff is one of the most critical aspects during the first few weeks of a new employee joining your team. During this period your new hires are exposed to everything from company history, structure, expectations, as well as being trained on how to use new programs that will let then work to the company standards. Ensuring that this step is done well is crucial to the the success of your team. If you can't engage your new team members during this process, you are setting yourself up for months, if not years of problems in the future. This is where personalized onboarding becomes so important.

We live in an age where technology rules everything around us. So why should on boarding be any different. With the use of a learning management system, a new employee can now work through their onboarding program from the comfort of their new desk, and at their own pace. Not only that, the content that they are working through can be completely personalized to suit that person’s role and avoid wasting time and energy absorbing information that is not a part of their responsibilities.
With the use of an online learning system, the employer also has a chance to make the experience more interactive. Courses are no longer only written material, the modern onboarding program contains a range of media including everything from video, photos, interactive exercises and workshops where the information is often presented in a a story format with a number of gamification elements included.

When do you think that you are you the most engaged? 

The average employee spends the majority of their day looking at a screen and reading, so do you really want to add more reading to their day? Video is a great way to give your team members a 'break' from their daily grind to learn some new information. While we say this is a 'break', this is more of a mindset. It allows them to sit back and absorb the information rather than having to read through documents. The use of a learning management system will also allow for the you to break up the video to include a number of interactive tests as the user is watching the video, creating an relaxed yet engaging environment.

The next advantage to an online system is being able to complete the program at your own pace while still meeting a deadline. This allows your new employees to break down the program into smaller parcels, letting them start to settle into their new role without being overwhelmed with training material. By allowing new employees to begin work in their role at an early stage, they are going to be able to harness their positive energy and excitement, and direct that into the business and in the process reinvigorating the team around them.

Some of the key takeaways that we have covered in how to improve your onboarding are:

Avoid text based documents and look for an learning management system.

Use a range of educational media (Video, Photos, Interactive Assessments)

Only specify information relevant to the new employees  role

Break the program into smaller segments that can be completed over a longer time frame

Allow the new hire to start taking charge of their role as soon as possible

Make it fun! It will keep the energy levels high, and happiness is contagious

How personalized onboarding will ignite your new staff

What is Cognitive Load? And who is Annie?

Well, you can find more out about ‘Annie' here:

Now that we have a nice soundtrack, we can talk about cognitive load, which is the stress put on a person’s short term memory during complex tasks. Humans are very intelligent but as we know, when we try to multitask anything more than a couple of things, the focus and productivity suffers, or worse yet we become overwhelmed and abandon the task.

In the context of using online applications, this is a critical consideration for an end user’s experience. For example, when a user is presented with an interface to complete a task, or series of tasks, there will be a certain amount of information they will have to store in their memory. In most cases we can’t completely avoid cognitive load, it’s just a matter of managing it. For example an application will inevitably need things like navigation, forms, and other interactions. It’s about how you present these elements that can make or break a great user experience.

Once a user has experienced how an application works, those tasks are memorised, so they can move their focus on to other elements of the application. Put simply, it’s like moving into a new house, having to learn which light switches turn on which lights, and what is in each cupboard. Once you master this you feel more comfortable and focus on the more important things like furnishing the house.

We have designed Go1 with this concept in mind. The experience for a student is intentionally simple. You will realise as you move through the product, from finding a course, to diving in to a module, and then interacting with resources and quizzes, that elements from the interface are quietly wisped away, because they are not relevant for that particular task. If you don’t have account, sign up here to see what I mean.

A focussed learner is a successful learner.

That’s a light introduction to cognitive load. Feel free to ask us more about this. Hopefully this is also useful information when creating your Go1 learning content.

One of the most important things at Go1 is making sure that everyone who uses our platform has an amazing learning experience. We are often asked what everything will look and feel like when a new learner logs into the system, so we have prepared a video to walk you through a Student experience.

After completing this walkthrough, you will be able to see what a new learner on your system will experience while using Go1.

You can also read through the key points mentioned in the video here:

Navigate to your organizations portal. Keep in mind the look and feel of the login page may depend on the organization. At bottom of the form you can “create an account”, Just fill in your basic details, agree to the terms of use and privacy policy, pass the captcha and click "Sign Up". We will then send out a welcome email to the email address specified with a one-time login link, from which you can navigate into the learning portal you have just signed up for.

It will prompt you to create a password for the system and then you are good to go.

In the Dashboard you will start off with a welcome message from the organization, and if you are not yet enrolled in any courses you have the choice to Browse the Marketplace courses. After you have enrolled into some courses, your five most recent courses will also be displayed on your dashboard, for quick access.

The color theme, banner images, welcome text are all dependent to your organization's portal, as well as whether or not the invite users and if the marketplace courses are enabled or not.

Along the left hand side menu we have a few different options to choose from. This is our Dashboard, we also have 'My Courses' and 'Company courses'. Here it shows all the courses that the organization has created for me to be able to enroll into.

Lastly we have the 'Marketplace'. A collection of compliance and training courses made available by other organizations, available for anyone to enroll into.

In the top right of our view, we can click our name to open up a drop down menu. By clicking 'Account' you will see that you are able to change the name and password details of your account. The email, as it is the reference for the account is not changeable. After you hit 'submit' a message will appear notifying us our details have been updated.

Let’s go back to the dashboard as if we were a new user just logged in. We can then navigate to the available Company Courses, and enrol into one of them. I need to do the first aid course. Clicking on it will enroll me into the course, which will mean this course will be populated in the “My Courses” page and also my dashboard.

On the course page you can see the course image as a banner across the top, you can click to reveal the course description and you can also see a list of the modules that the course comprises of. Each of these modules has a description and a collection of materials that are allocated to them. You can also view all workshops available for the course, as well as any assignments that must be uploaded along the right hand side.

Let's begin by clicking "Continue" on module 1. Inside a module, we're presented with a banner header of the module image, the module title and description. The pathway of each module is a clean cut linear progression. In the top left we can click 'Resources' to open a drop down of all resources in this module. Clicking on a resource will then take you directly to this material. You can also scroll to view other resources in the the module.

Go1 supports the uploading of PDF documents along with many other file types such as power point, word and excel, all of which are converted to HTML5, allowing them to be viewed within any browser on any device. Within each of these documents, you can click the fullscreen button. Here you can highlight text, insert further text, and add comments to markup the document however you wish. You can then navigate through the document by clicking the buttons or also by using your mouse to scroll.

At the bottom of your screen you will notice a button, clicking this, we can seamlessly progress to the next resource.

We can finish off this module by taking a quiz. We can see the title, any description or instruction, and then a button to start our quiz assessment. Quizzes can be made up of a number of question types such as Multiple Choice, True/False, matching, short answer and long answer questions. Depending on how the quiz is created, you may receive instant feedback. You'll also receive results on how your attempt went at the end, which can be specified by the admin or can be generated by the system automatically.

You will see at the bottom, there is an image and description of the next module. Click the Next Module button to proceed straight to the next module in the course.

A couple of other resource types the system can utilize are SCORM and TinCan, for interactive learning. In the video above you can see an interactive version of a First Aid SCORM file that can be added as another form of assessment in your modules.

Along the right hand side you'll see a list of any available workshops you can enroll in.  Sometimes you may have to attend all workshops or you may just have to attend one of the available options. This section details which modules workshop are required, what date and times they are happening, and what location they are held. Clicking on the enrol button will allow the admin to know which workshop you are going to be attending.

There is also the functionality to upload assignments. You can simply click to open up the assignment, and it will show you the requirements for the task as well as a drag and drop box for your file, and a notes section if you want to add any further information. Once you have clicked to upload the document it will be sent to your tutor to mark.

You'll notice that once you've completed all your resources and assessments inside a module, it's status on the course view will update from In Progress to Completed.

Once you have completed all requirements for the course, depending on your organization's course setup, you may be allowed to download a certificate to show that you have completed everything required for the qualification.

You can create an account on a portal, or a user account may be created for you. You'll receive a welcome email and can click the one-time login link inside. You'll then be logged into the system to set your own password.

Once in the system you can enroll in a course from 'Company Courses', once enrolled you'll then see that course on your dashboard or in 'My Courses'.

You can access the system and continue your courses from anywhere you have a web browser and an internet connection. You can use any browser and any device.

If you forget your password, just click the Forgot Password link on the sign in page, input your email and you'll be sent a one-time login link to access the your system and set a new password.

The battle between classroom learning and online learning has been raging for the past few years, and with one in four college students in the United States studying online, the times are changing. While this might be a big shift in the traditional education sense, today 77% of companies in the United States offer online corporate training for professional development of their employees.

When you have had all of your training documents in place for many years, why should you make the switch to take your training online? There is a whole stack of benefits around having a learning management system for your business, and today we will dive into five reasons why you should take your training online.

Training your staff online allows for you to create a more personalized training experience. Where in the past all of staff will have completed the same training, as most likely had to sit through material that was not relevant to their position, through an online program you can ensure that all material is relevant to the employee. With the personalized experience also comes a more engaged student, and less time spent completing a program.

How many times have you spent a day sitting in a giant conference room packed full of people for a training session where the main thing you were concerned about was making sure you got to eat one of the few sandwiches that was provided for lunch? Those days are over. By holding your training sessions online, your team can now complete their training from wherever they please. This can mean a massive reduction in down time and associated travel costs, as well as being able to complete courses at a time that suits their calendar.

It allows employees to learn at their own pace

Not everyone learns at the same pace, or enjoys spending a whole day doing a training course. The flexibility of running your training online means that your team can progress at their own pace. This means that they are not rushing through the content to ensure they finish in time, they can absorb the information and leave having understood the topic. Just because the course is online it doesn’t mean that you won’t have help either, if students get stuck they always have access to a coordinator who can assist them.

Due to ease of running training online, it’s not a hassle to run courses for your team more frequently. This is also a great for keeping your content current and running short courses to keep your team up to date with changes in compliance as they happen. Staff can also take additional courses as a part of their professional development that can be held in a company library for all employees across a company to access.

The bottom line for all training programs is the budget. Companies are willing to put a set amount of money into training their staff each year, and you have to make the most of it. With the implementation of a good Learning Management System, creating and managing courses is more efficient that ever, and having the flexibility to train staff remotely and only on the information relevant to them saves everyone time which translates into a huge cost saving.

More more information on online training for your company visit go1.com

5 reasons why you should take your training online

Another big month of product updates and improvements in October. We thought we would share a few of the larger changes which we think you will enjoy as part of this new release.

We have revamped the user experience for learners. The navigation and progression for users through a course is now more streamlined and enjoyable. We believe that when a user sits down to learn about a topic they should be focused on that task, so we have designed the experience to minimise distractions and maximised the learning.

We have been working with a number of our clients to develop out this features. From one portal you can share courses with other Go1 learning portals allow custom learning experiences for different users while managing the courses in one place. This is useful when you need to deliver training to a mixture of internal and external users or just different departments in your business.

We have added support for embedding Vimeo videos into your courses. This is in addition to the existing support for YouTube and custom uploaded mp4 files. Using the private video features in Vimeo you can have your video content streamed from one the best video hosting platforms while still have the ability to control access to your content. This also means that if you already have video content in Vimeo it is every easier to build your courses.

Providing custom certificates has been updated this release to provide more flexibility. You can use either PDF or DOCX files to generate a template for your courses. Each course can have a custom templates or you can share the one template between courses. You can map any tokens you have included in your certificate templates to the data in Go1. Please see our previous blog post on how to upload and manage certificates.

The process of adding and managing the content in your courses and modules has been streamlined in the administration interface. First select the resource type from the dropdown, you can select from video, document, Scorm, Tincan (xAPI) or Quiz. Once added you can quickly and easily re-order these items.

The list of updates doesn’t stop here, we are constantly reviewing each and every features in Go1 and our full change log for the month of October includes over 150 enhancements. Many of these are small improvements

We are always keen to hear your feedback, so let us know your thoughts by contacting us support@go1.com.

Welcome to the Go1 blog. Helping you to achieve your L&D goals through the latest learning and development insights, trends, and technology.

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