We thank the organizations that have joined us in our effort to ensure affordable access to 21st century enterprise level education technology to micro and small businesses.
Please share your thoughts, suggestions, and comments with us on our blog.
Mubina Gillani, CEO, Empowered Training Centre
Our mission is to enable organizations to succeed in these difficult economic times.
In last month’s article, we wrote about the blurring of boundaries between the physical world and cyberspace. The rapid adoption of Internet technology to deliver services across industries has made the everyday use of technology a critical function for success in the 21st century infrastructure. However, until recently, prohibitive costs have prevented micro and small businesses to participate in this rapid adoption.
We now have Software as a Service (SaaS) technologies and business models to thank as these allow small businesses to rapidly come up to speed and afford access to enterprise level technology for their education needs. Recently, many companies have cut back on the training of their employees and clients in order to cut training costs. This does not have to be the case. Using technology that is integrated with a strong methodology to deliver curriculum in a high impact and cost effective manner can reduce training costs significantly.
There are very few elearning technologies that offer the ability to seamlessly integrate different modalities and learning elements. Many traditional enterprise level learning management systems (LMS) used by medium and large organizations have spun off from decades old technologies and are very costly. In these economic times, companies continue to make difficult cost cutting decisions while balancing prudence with continued investment in their future.
Prepared to Deliver
Empowered Training Centre, with is Multimodal Intelligent Learning and Education System (MILES®) and SaaS business model, has taken on the challenge of enabling micro and small businesses to become consumers of and effectively use enterprise level technology solutions and services. To help organizations that are struggling, we have developed education catalogs at significantly lower costs allowing all to afford training.
Although our current catalogs serve the industries and communities listed below, we will continue to build and deliver industry and niche specific education and training with the objective of enabling organizations, regardless of size, to sustain the skills of their employees and ensure regulatory and certification requirements. Current catalogs include:
- Human Resource and Corporate Professionals
- Child Care Professionals
- Health Care Professionals including Retail Clinics
- Education: Student Leadership Development
Despite the need to cut costs, organizations cannot risk eroding their image with their clients. Through MILES®, our clients invest significantly less yet benefit from a staff that is trained on many more skills as well as regulatory compliance.
We invite you to visit us at http://empoweredtraining.com as well as comment on our blog.
Empowered Training Centre (ETC) is a provider of technology, training, instructional design, and consulting services to organizations. For more information, email us at contact@empoweredtraining.com.
How would being able to access quality, certified, online training at your convenience change the way you do your job?
Mubina Gillani, CEO, Empowered Training Centre
If you can imagine it, you can create it.
The world as we know it is changing rapidly as technology, tools and human behavior in cyberspace integrates with that of the physical world. The boundary between these two worlds has blurred and will quickly disappear.
Since Netscape brought the Internet to the masses in 1995, various sources state that there are now over 1.5 billion Internet users globally. This has resulted in a fundamental change in human behavior as it has enabled a frontierless global community. Distrust of technology by expert educators is being replaced by great interest resulting in a greater use of highly interactive tools over the web.
Technologies and tools are becoming much more cost effective as greater use and demand by the masses is driving down the cost. Enterprise level technologies are now available to small schools, to parents for home schooling, and to individual learners. Technical interfaces are becoming more sophisticated and ‘intelligent’ in their applications allowing subject matter experts to trust these applications and focus their expertise on achieving higher impact.
For example, within the education industry, a fundamental change is taking place in the role of the educator. The educator is evolving from being a primary conveyor of concepts to that of a coach and mentor, one whose focus is on using diagnostic tools to identify and fill gaps in an individual’s level of knowledge while concepts are deployed in an interactive manner through technology. The educator’s role is to ensure a solid roadmap for individual learners while facilitating the deployment of concepts to a much larger group of dispersed learners in a self-paced manner through technologies over the Internet.
The future is here with the reach of the educator widening; no longer does a learner have to come to a common physical place at a specific time. They can now participate via devices (desktops, laptops, or cell phones) at a time that is convenient to them. This has empowered learners to use their time in the best way possible. An example is a potential high school dropout who due to economic circumstances has to work during normal school hours. This is a reality for many families that face poverty or are recent immigrants. Now, there is no need for these students to drop out. They can study and learn at a different pace from other students, using a different time during the day that is available to them. There are many other situations that used to prevent access to excellent education, including geographic distances and health situations. This no longer has to be the case.
This rapid change in the role of educators as a result of the adoption of the ‘right’ technology will speed up over the next few years and will become the norm. This growth will be further facilitated by the effective application of the $39 billion in President Obama’s stimulus plan targeted for Education Technology.
We anticipate our MILES® technology to be one such technology that will enable this change, a technology that is sophisticated, powerful, and affordable. MILES® is a bridge to knowledge that fulfills a natural need for an educational institution. The curriculum deployed through MILES® can be individualized and deployed based on the profile of the student. Algorithms within the deployment methodology measure students’ participation and progress allowing instructors to use their time more effectively to coach to the gaps of individual students ensuring a deeper understanding of the subject being taught.
There is great opportunity at this time for school districts and universities to demonstrate the power of collaboration and reduce their costs exponentially by using education technologies such as MILES® that are developed using Software as a Service architecture and business model. This is the time when educational institutions can move from independently licensing technology to sharing a multi-tenant platform along with common curriculum while still retaining the ability to have secure independent connections as well as differentiate on niche education.
How does your organization currently address the need for training?
Have you seen a change at your organization during the recent economic downturn?
From your viewpoint, how would you structure training keeping in mind cost and time involved?
How has the recent economic downturn affected your organization? What impact has it had on you, and how are you dealing with it?
“An inventor is simply a person who doesn’t take his education too seriously. You see, from the time a person is six years old until he graduates from college he has to take three or four examinations a year. If he flunks once, he is out. But an inventor is almost always failing. He tries and fails maybe a thousand times. If he succeeds once then he’s in. These two things are diametrically opposite. We often say that the biggest job we have is to teach a newly hired employee how to fail intelligently. We have to train him to experiment over and over and to keep on trying and failing until he learns what will work.”
— Charles Kettering
We all know there is a recession, and there are many companies that seem to be failing. The media continues to feed the fear of continued economic downturn. There are no successes, or none that come to light through the media. Most people are waiting and watching with a sense of doom and apathy, and yet there are some that are filled with hope and are actively seeking opportunities. We see this in small examples, such as a professional in the IT industry that I met last month who was anticipating being laid off and had already formed a home health care company with the intent of working with his wife who is a nurse.
Every business, every manager, every professional has the opportunity to choose between apathy and creativity. Apathy will bring with it inertia: no energy, no creativity, no one initiating change, dependent on the same approaches and processes year after year. For these, there will be eventual change, but it will come from the outside, with executives making decisions to cut budgets or from clients choosing to go elsewhere, drawn by positive energy, interest, and pleasant service.
Here is one example: Recently, two medium sized companies in the U.S. took a hatchet to their training budgets and laid off every one in their education department. This decision is not entirely the fault of the executives; it is also a result of apathy in the leadership within the targeted department. It requires creative thinking by the leaders in every department to demonstrate to executives how they can increase efficiencies and decrease costs significantly through the use of different business models; it requires looking outside the bubble to find new and readily available solutions to meet their needs; and it requires speed of action as well as regular communication with the executives. It requires becoming part of the solution.
It is about people and their development:
Success in these times will be measured by an organization’s ability to achieve its goals with apathy being their number one enemy. People are tremendously important during these times; their skills along with their attitudes can make or break a company. Some organizations are cutting costs carefully while ensuring the key training elements that provide energy and core knowledge for their employees and clients remain intact while cutting peripheral training. Many are moving from traditional classroom training to a hybrid of online and live training.
With the number of innovative strategies such as the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, this is a creative time for training organizations to revamp their traditional approach, regardless of whether they use classroom or online training. This will allow them to significantly reduce costs and still meet their organization’s people development needs.
The education and training market will never revert to traditional ways of doing things. Change is here to stay. Organizations will have to adapt and begin using technology and innovative business models more aggressively.
After cutting their training budgets, many organizations are using informal and on-the-job training. This can be extremely costly in the long run. We have heard recently of a company that had to pay a $2.5 million fine to the U.S. government because one of its front line employees did not know the importance of shredding private information, dumping it in the trash can instead. This type of consistent regulatory compliance knowledge cannot be transferred informally. Interactivity and assessments are required to assure management that knowledge is consistently transmitted and is being actively used.
Remember, training is a service. This service is provided to employees and customers to increase performance, productivity, and loyalty – all of which drive revenue. Lead your organization to achieve these objectives efficiently, while reducing unnecessary costs. Find the right approaches, tools, and technology for your organization. Approaches that provide tremendous value to your organization and help you achieve maximum benefit.
All businesses today need leaders in every role and position, not just in management positions. It takes initiative and individual drive to make a business work in today’s environment. It is what attracts customers, a differentiator in these highly competitive times. Empowered Training’s newsletter this month is a call to managers and professionals to wake up, to take the bull by the horns and play an active role as a leader within their organization.
This month we are launching a blog as part of our monthly newsletter allowing you the opportunity to communicate with us. You may find yourself nodding in agreement when reading an article, or you may disagree with something, or you may even wish to share a situation or circumstance relevant to the topic. Now you can link to our blog and share your thoughts! We look forward to hearing from you.
