This is a question we concern ourselves with here at KnowledgeWave, because our business depends on the answer. Businesses and organizations of all sizes, from one-person micro-businesses to larger operations which employ hundreds or even thousands of people all need training. How should it best be chosen and delivered? As business itself changes, so does the answer to this question.

Trends

Changing trends tell us what’s happening now, and from current events we can figure out what might happen in the future if events continue. So here are some trends we’ve noticed:

• Smaller workforce, which means only a small number of personnel can be out of the office at a time for training. As the number of single-person businesses increases, more people simply cannot take an entire day or several days to attend lengthy training sessions.
• Globally dispersed workforce, which means that physical training locations are no longer an optimal solution for training.
• Advances in technology (and in how technology is used), which provide entirely new ways of communicating and interacting, such as webinars, teleconference classes, social media, web video, blogging, and more.
• Rising fuel costs, which make travel more expensive.
• Increasing desire to cut costs, which make time- and money-sucking travel a much less appealing option for training.
• Environmental impact awareness, which makes us conscious of how travel takes its toll on the environment by producing greenhouse gases and using fossil fuels. The use of consumable goods increaeses during travel, producing more recyclable and non-recyclable waste.

How KnowledgeWave Answers the Trends

We’ve taken a hard look at what’s happening in the world and have morphed our business into a highly competitive 21st-century operation. We’ve done this by redirecting our attention to the entire world, not just our “back yard” of Vermont. We’ve embraced technologies and business practices that meet the needs of the world, not just Vermonters.

Highly cross-trained and knowledgeable staff 

Nobody at KnowledgeWave does just one thing. All of us are trainers, but some of us are also designers, marketers, salespersons, copywriters, accountants, and courseware writers. We are small and extremely agile. Case in point: we successfully launched our webinar offerings two months ahead of schedule.

Moving from the classroom to the internet

Physical travel is becoming less desireable for many reasons, as the above trends show. Eliminating travel saves money, time, and the environment. Through webinars and remote classroom instruction (RCI), we can actually offer more for the same amount of money or less, but our clients enjoy reduced or eliminated travel expenses and time out-of-office.

Embracing managed asset reflation

Other training companies become our allies, not our competition. The in-house training departments of companies around the world have now become our customers, instead of our competition.

Did you know you can get updates from millions of news websites and industry blogs in Outlook 2007? By subscribing to feeds, you can recieve updated information without visiting all your favorite websites individually.

Here’s how:

1. Find a website or a blog that you want to receive updates from. Look for the little orange icon with the “radio waves” on it like this: (we have one here on our blog, too, on the right side of the page). Click on that. Dont’ worry about what the page looks like, just copy the address out of the address bar at the top.
2. In Outlook 2007, you should have that same orange icon in your inbox folders on the left. It will be labeled as RSS feeds (RSS stands for real simple syndication). Right-click on that and choose to add a new feed.
3. A message will appear, choose to accept the feed.
4. There will be a plus (+) button next to RSS feeds. Click on it to expand it, and you’ll see your feeds listed below it.
5. When a feed updates with new information, it will look and behave like an unread email, and you can navigate and read your feeds just like emails. Unlike emails, however, you may want to delete old feed updates, instead of archive them.

Now you can pore through hundreds of web pages in only a few minutes! You don’t have to visit the web pages, they come to you.

Google Analytics is a powerful, free service from Google that allows you track and understand your website visitors. The more you know about your customers, the better you can market and sell your services online. You can see where your website visitors came from before they landed on your website, see what kind of search keywords they used to find you, see how they traveled through your website, and much more. This webinar introduces you to the concept of web analytics, covers the basics of setting up a Google Analytics account, and shows you how to place the tracking code into your web pages.

The webinar is running November 10 at 10:00 AM Eastern time.

Learn more about this webinar here or register immediately here.

You can see info about all of KnowledgeWave’s webinars here.