How e-learning can benefit your business

Running and working in a small business requires flexibility and lots of it. One moment you can be sending out invoices, the next pricing up a contract, negotiating with a supplier, meeting with shareholders, creating your own promotional material or building a website...

As a small business you may not have the resources to employ a lot of staff or to pay middlemen to carry out tasks that you could perhaps handle in-house with a little extra knowledge and experience. You probably can’t afford the time or money to train staff in new skills either, and this leaves many business owners with a dilemma.

You could continue to pay third parties as consultants, or you could try to tackle these tasks yourself. However, without proper training you could end up losing money rather than making it. Alternatively you could recruit employees who are already skilled in the right areas, but the problem with all these options is that it can cost a lot of money or involve a lot of risk.

With a magic wand of course you would enable existing staff or yourself to gain knowledge in new areas, in a manner that doesn't cost a lot of money, at a time that fits in with the ups and downs of the business workload, at the right speed and from any location, whether work or home. 

Unfortunately this is not Hogwarts and there are no magic wands to fix problems like skills shortages in an instant, but there is e-learning - also known as computer based training.

Growth area

In recent yers, e-learning has been one of the big growth areas in the field of training and organisations and firms such as The Open University, MindLeaders and Learndirect offer a huge range of courses on a vast array of business and technical topics.

Some courses lead to well-recognised qualifications, such as post graduate degrees. Other courses don't lead to qualifications but will enable a student to study and prepare for a specific exam they want to take, such as the European Computer Driving Licence. Others are just for personal development, and students print out certificates at the end as proof of course completion. On some courses every student gets access to a dedicated tutor for assistance while others offer support for technical enquiries only.

Most e-learning providers offer courses or videos which can all be downloaded cheaply and quickly to your PC via the internet. The most innovative are available on a subscription basis, which means you’ll have access to new courses as and when they become available and, because the files are kept small download times are kept to a minimum.

Courses are often interactive and so require connection to the internet while they are being worked on, but once you’ve bought a course, or subscribed to a series of courses you are free to re-visit that course as many times as you like.

Tailored for small businesses

Many of these courses are specifically designed for small businesses and the topics cover business areas ranging from how to develop your negotiation skills to using everyday computer programmes such as Excel, Access and Project and from managing staff, website design and HTML coding. The courses vary in length and they are normally pitched at different levels so they meet the needs of novice, intermediate and experienced users.

E-learning has proven to be a wonderful development tool for many businesses and is proving to be a very stimulating learning medium.

Finally, it is also very flexible which is particularly suited to busy people as you don't normally have to complete the course in one sitting but can tackle it in bite-sized chunks that fit around your work.

If you’d like to find out more about e-learning options we have for your business, visit our product and service pages.