Following the death of Steve Jobs, the war for smartphone custom took a respectful and well-earned break from its assault onto global markets. However, the battle is back on, and with news this week emerging that Samsung has managed to pull ahead of Apple in sale numbers, shows that there is no time to waste.

The question is, what can these businesses do to stay ahead of the pack, especially coming into the crucial festive period? Well, interestingly there is a clear link here to online training, because Chinese telecommunications company Huawei (which is developing its new smartphone as we speak) is investing time and effort, as part of its sale strategy, in training up its customer service staff so that they have a sound knowledge of the product and its functionality. As we all know, we don’t just buy a product, we buy into the brand and all that goes along with that brand, so if a business can assure customers of great after-sale service with highly trained and knowledgeable agents, the value of the product is bumped up significantly.

So, how can manufacturers install this level understanding into the staff out on the front line? Well, this isn’t necessarily a new concept, some manufacturers have gone to great lengths to design training programmes that develop understanding of their products, simply because it allows them to sell their inventions and new creations on a different level.

It makes sense. The creator of Wow Stuff! toys has a similar approach, though he only allows his own trained staff to sell his products in stores during the festive period, because this is the way he knows he can maximise sales and ensure that no custom is lost.

For manufacturers that don’t have the resource to go to such extremes, e-learning programmes hold the key. They can be easily accessed (even on smartphones or when at home), individuals can take ownership and responsibility of when they carry out the training, and for both these reasons it can be a really effective way of developing skills and knowledge of a certain product or service.

The training management system software is available to design bespoke training programmes, without the need for programming or design skills.  How powerful could it be to develop a product and then translate the uniqueness of that product throughout the business, from the boardroom to the lab, and from the marketing team to the sales staff?

For the smartphone sales battle, it would seem that training and development is an option that could generate significant results, and when you consider just how simple it is to develop the training programme and to then share it with staff – why aren’t more companies taking this approach?

If you want to hear more about the accessplanit Composica e-learning authoring tool, just get in touch with the team on 0845 543 0229 or email enquiries@accessplanit.com.  

Over the past year or so we have had many organisations contact us as they are looking to transfer existing classroom based courses into e -learning or by supplementing classroom courses with e-learning.

The difficulty all these organisation have faced is finding a solution that will enable them to upload, sell and deliver elearning through their website without requiring a huge investment or specialist technical knowledge.   This demand led to us creating a new edition of the LMS -   accessplan eCommerce LMS . Accessplan LMS eCommerce edition combines e-commerce facilities with a powerful learning management and marketing tools giving training companies all the tools they need to deploy elearning that customer are demanding quickly and easily.  

In the last 12 months the eCommerce edition has won a Brandon Hall award for  “Best Advance in Learning Technology For External Training” , it was also picked out by visitors to Learning Technologies 2011 as ‘One to watch in 2011’ .  

We are hosting webinars on 17th and 25th February where we will be showing training organisations how they can sell online courses (e-learning courses). Please click here to register.


Related Blog:
Training Providers Consider eLearning

Composica, accessplanit's rapid elearning authoring tool has won an elearning 24/7 award in the category 'I didn't know it was possible'.

Composica was selected as the winner for its unique functionality set which includes:

• Social Learning Content Authoring Tool
• Project blog, comments, & RSS feeds keeping authors connected
• RLOs
• Game based learning
• Dynamic
• Task lists, task reports and audit trails
• Assessment tool built in
• SCORM 2004/1.2 compliant
• Blogs can be embedded into courses/content
• Ratings
• Mashups, Google charts
• Bookmarking, state restoration

Composica is a full-featured, collaborative rapid elearning authoring tool that enables organisations to create high-quality, interactive e-learning – without the need for programming or design skills.

Composica is web based application available on a hosted or SaaS basis.

There are thousands of e-learning solutions online, alloffering a quick fix solution to your software problems. Whether you arelooking for health and safety e-learning courses or information technologycourses for programmes such as Word or Excel, you will find plenty of coursesonline, but which one is the right one for you?

At AccessPlanIT we have been scouring the web and testing the best tools online to give you somefeedback on what e-learning software products will work for you.

The team know thatcustomers demand products that are easy to use, incorporate the best available technology and provide the same level of support that they lookto provide in their own organisation. That why we focus on giving ourclients the tools that solve real problems and a support servicethat they can rely upon.

Our team want to ensure that you have all the informationavailable to you before you make your decision and hope that our key points tochoosing your e-learning tool will help you make the right choice.

What is your budget?

If you have limited funds your options are slightly narrowedand you may need to consider one of the desktop tools available. The most common is Word or PowerPoint which are a great base authoring tool.

If you have a bit of cash to spend it may be a good idea toscale up your authoring across your organisation or have a dedicated team of individuals doing the work. It could be worth considering a collaborative server-based authoring tool. These types of programmes tend to have more powerful capabilities and some are multi-purpose allowing for systems and non systems training.

What is your skillbase?

The idea of investing into a tool sounds like a great idea, but once you have bought it do you actually know how to use it? And how easily can you bring other staff members onto the team to use it?

If you take on desktop tools, which are of a similar standard to office applications it should have an immediate ring of familiarity to your staff.

However, server-based tools –while do share some features of windows applications – generally require a longer familiarisation period, but over a long period of time can deliver more sophisticated results. It would be a good idea to weigh up the pain vs. the gain when making your choice.

What is your ambition?

If you want to produce simple, static content with questions and quizzes then a desktop authoring tool will work just fine. However, thereare means and ways for this to stretch a little further.

The majority of marketing leading tools fully integrate audio, video and flash animation files. Having the flexibility allows to create content-rich media.

In other words, the more ambitious you are about how you present your learning, the higher the end tool you need to aim for.

Systems training andbeyond

If your main aim is to primarily or exclusively train insystems you need to consider a specialist systems training authoring tool.

If you are looking into non systems training for example,management skills or induction training, then a generalist tool will offer wider scope for content authoring, but it won’t lend itself well to systems training. Make sure you know what you are buying into and what it will do before you make your purchase.

For more information about e learning courses available visit www.AccessPlanIT.com or call 0845 543 0229.

E-learning is dead, long live E-learning. We say this because E-learning has become so prevalent in today’s society, it has overwhelmingly bridged the gap between work-based learning and traditional classroom courses to offer the ultimate learning experience.

What in essence is thought of as E-learning or Social Learning is actually being practised each and every day through face-to-face teaching.

There are several ways in which this has happened:  

Social Media Tools
Sites such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are used in classrooms and seminars as well as to engage learners in the workplace.

Blogs
No longer are blogs confined as do-at-home ditties; they’re now used in classrooms as personal web spaces to produce and submit work and creative ideas.

Presentations
Sites such as SlideShare can host presentations which are often used in lectures. Students will then log-on at home to go over the presentations again – probably as they were too busy texting during the initial display!

Recordings
Tools such as Echo360 and Camtasia help us record lectures to keep a record of both the content but also to make it available for recap and revision purposes – this was originally used as the only way to deliver the materials to online learners.

Email and More
Learners have always used email to contact teaching staff, as well as discussion boards and forums for support, subject-specific activities, FAQs and more. These days, online and face-to-face students use the same tools.

These are all tools and activities that were once used solely to engage and encourage geographically-disparate learners, but are now being used increasingly for corporate learning initiatives, often in a way that can increase the quality of teacher-contact time the learners have.