So what’s auditory learning? You may not think we’d have many auditory learners completing an online training course and there was probably a time when that was so. But with the ability to upload videos to our learning management system, we’re now able to bridge the gap and provide our training courses to the nearly 20 percent of the population who are auditory learners.
Where Auditory Learners Excel
Typically, auditory learners excel at writing responses to information they’ve just heard, and because they’re also verbal learners, they’re good at delivering speeches or oral exams.
Auditory learners are likely to:
Enjoy discussions, talking things through and listening to others
Acquire knowledge by reading aloud
Follows spoken directions well
Watch videos
About 20 percent of the world’s population are auditory learners and they thrive being in the company of others, particularly in the learning environment where they can bounce ideas off other students.
There was a time when online learning or distance education perhaps wouldn’t have been the most viable option for these kinds of people, but that’s now changed. Auditory learners can use our video training videos and connect with other students at our online student community so they can discuss the course content and exercises.
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At EzyLearn, we’re aware of the different ways our students learn and we’re always adapting our course content and materials to satisfy those different learning styles, and ultimately, to help you learn better.
Visual learning is one of the most common ways people learn.
In our post called “What’s Your Learning Style?” we looked at the ways our students typically prefer to learn, and in our last post, we discussed the characteristics of the kinaesthetic learning style. In this post (are you following? You should be able to if you possess the learning traits of our next learning style!) we’re going to discuss visual learners.
The Most Common Way to Learn – Visually
As our most popular online training course, the MYOB training course, is a software-based course, we have a great deal of visual learners among our students.
Visual learners are those who learn best by seeing them, and find that confusing information is best explained with the aid of a picture or video tutorial.
Visual learners are likely to:
Take detailed notes
Need quiet study time
Benefit from illustrations, presentations and videos
Remember diagrams or pictures
About 65 percent of the population are believed to be visual learners, and even though they’re good with written materials, the online learning delivery method didn’t always meet their needs when it came to visual aids. Now, thanks to the internet, learning providers like EzyLearn are able to provide our content online, accompanied by training videos and presentations, so our visual learners now have the added visual aids to help them learn.
As one of Australia’s largest providers of online MYOB training courses, we’ve come to learn a thing or two about our students’ learning habits and what we’ve discovered is that there are three different kinds of learners — visual learners, auditory learners and kinaesthetic learners.
There’s no right or wrong way of learning, but we thought it would be interesting to have a look at these three learning styles in a little more detail.
Learning … Kinaesthetically
First up: kinaesthetic learners. People with a kinaesthetic learning style learn by touching and doing things, and although they only make up about 5 percent of the population, they’re a group of learners we see a fair bit at EzyLearn. This is because our training courses are software-based and at some point people become pretty eager to give the software they’re learning about a test drive.
Kinaesthetic learners are the students who learn by discovery, can complete more than one task at once and are those students who like to listen to music while they work.
Kinaesthetic learners are likely to:
Need lots of breaks
Speak with their hands and gesture a lot
Learn by working with others
Remember what was done
Learn by doing activities
The benefit of being a kinaesthetic learner and studying with EzyLearn is that you’re able to study at your own pace (so you can take lots of breaks), get hands-on with the software and try some of the exercises, and you can also interact with other students at our student community to get that much-need dose of human interaction.
It is this kind of flexibility that online learning offers that makes it so appealing to a broad range of learning styles that the traditional face-to-face offering often can’t provide.
Not a kinaesthetic learner? See tomorrow’s post on visual learners.
Humans all have different ways of learning and absorbing information. Which style are you?
As Australia’s leading provider of online MYOB training courses, over the years we’ve come to observe the different learning styles of our students. What we’ve witnessed is that everybody has a different approach to learning, and in particular, that a one-size-fits-all approach to learning just isn’t that effective.
While it may not seem like it, the very flexible nature of the online learning environment actually better caters to all of those different learning styles — whether our students are visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners, we make sure to include something in the content of our online training courses that will make the learning process easier and more engaging.
Broader Content to Reach a Broader Base of Learning Styles
In fact, the different ways people learn was something we came to notice way back when we still operated our physical training centres on the north shore, northern beaches and other parts of Sydney. But we discovered that even though the face-to-face learning environment is the conventional way to learn, it is not necessarily an all-encompassing one.
When we moved our training material online, it presented us with the opportunity to provide a broader range of content that engaged with a broader range of students. In the years since we offered our first online MYOB training course, we have continued to update our content to ensure we’re always engaging with all of our students, regardless of their learning styles.
For those of you wondering what your learning style is, then you wonder no more! We’ve put together a series of posts, outlining the different characteristics of each learning style. Are you a visual, auditory or a kinaesthetic learners? It might help you realise why some techniques just feel natural for you and why some information just tends to stick!
Understanding Your Own Learning Style
Expanding your knowledge of how you learn helps you to learn better and work through the course content more efficiently — it may even help you work more efficiently in the workplace, or with others who may adopt a different learning style to yours.
Now that’s going to be nasty … is your business complying with current WHS regulations?
When we moved our training materials online, we developed our own learning management system, a software application that administers our MYOB training course, small business management course and all of our other online training courses.
Deliver Your Company Training Material Online – Work Health and Safety
But an opportunity exists for small to medium-sized businesses to deliver their company training material online, using EzyLearn’s learning management system — this is particularly useful for work health and safety (WHS) training.
Now that Australia’s WHS laws have changed, there’s a renewed push for businesses to be vigilant when it comes to workplace safety. Harsher punishments for business owners found to be in breach of the WHS Act 2011 now includes fines of up to $3 million per organisation and $600,000 or 5 years imprisonment per person, per breach.
The changes follow a rash of litigation across the country, where companies have been prosecuted for not ensuring that contractors and sub-contractors working on their premises have been made aware of all the potential risks and hazards associated with carrying out work on their premises.
Under the Act, a business owner can be prosecuted based on what they can be reasonably expected to know in relation to work health and safety risks. This means that, if a contractor carrying out welding on the premises of a business is injured, the business owner can be prosecuted because it is reasonable to expect the business owner to know that carrying out welding near flammable gases is hazardous.
Contractor and Sub-Contractor Liability
The move to include contractors and sub-contractors carrying out work for, or on behalf of, a business is one of the key changes to the WHS Act 2011, which was introduced in January 2012, and replaces the previous OH&S Act 1991. This presents a number of potential areas of risk for business owners who retain the services of contractors, and even remote, home-based workers.
In a landmark ruling in 2011, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Queensland awarded a Telstra employee legal and medical costs after she slipped and fell down the stairs twice while working from her Brisbane home.
The tribunal’s ruling has effectively extended the employer’s liability beyond what they traditionally thought was reasonable, to include the unknowns of an employee’s home. As such, for small business owners employing or retaining the services of home-based workers, making certain you have the correct WHS procedures and training in place should be a priority.
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Using EzyLearn’s learning management system to deliver your company’s WHS training materials allows your staff, contractors or remote workers to access the content regardless of where they’re based, so you have peace of mind in knowing that they’ve been made properly aware of any risks or hazards relating to their work — and their workplace.
If you would like to know more about how EzyLearn’s learning management system works, contact us.
We offer training courses in MYOB, because it’s the market leader in accounting software and because it’s the preferred software of choice for most accountants. For start-ups or other small businesses, however, Zoho Books or Invoice might be all you need for your business, which is why we’re going to provide some videos on how to use Zoho.
Just What is Zoho Invoice?
For now, though, we’re going to look at the functions of Zoho Invoice. If you have recently started your own virtual assistant business or another business that really only requires you to invoice your clients, then Zoho Invoice is all you would really need.
The best thing about Zoho Invoice is that if you have 5 or fewer customers and only need access for one user, it’s completely free — forever. After that, the next step up is the standard plan, which allows you to have up to 500 customers and 3 users for $USD15 a month; the professional plan costs $USD30 with unlimited customers and unlimited users.
Even if you use the free plan, you can still access all of Zoho Invoice’s features, including time tracking, recurring invoices, expense, tracking, multi-currency, payment gateways and automated overdue payment reminders; you can even customise your invoices with your company logos and branding.
As your business grows, you can upgrade your plan to the standard or professional versions of Zoho Invoice, or even upgrade to Zoho Books if you’re in need of a more comprehensive piece of accounting software. There’s also an iPhone and Android app for Zoho Invoice, which allows you to create invoices on the go.
While Zoho is an American owned and operated company, you’re still able to customize the settings for an Australian business. This means you’re able to charge in Australian dollars, add GST, and you’re able input information like ABNs.
The downside is that there isn’t a local number for their customer service team, so you have to get in contact via email. That being said, Zoho has an online forum where you can ask and answer questions and they also provide a number of videos to help you with troubleshooting.
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Overall, Zoho Invoice is a good piece of cloud-based invoicing software that is both inexpensive and highly functional. For a virtual assistant or a start-up that only needs to invoice customers, it sure beats the hell out of that tired, old Excel invoice! Stay tuned for more on Zoho and the Zoho Office Suite.
Since we closed our Sydney-based training centres in Dee Why, Gordon and Parramatta in 2006 and went 100% online we’ve been able to offer more for a lower price.
For the same price we use to charge for a one day training course in MYOB we are now able to offer ALL 5 MYOB training courses AND provide lifetime course access (INCLUDING updated course content).
You might also recall that our online support team comprises remote workers who operate their own virtual assistant business from all over Australia and even internationally so we are thrilled to be part of the new revolution in remote workers.
We are also very proud to be a Partner of the Australian Government Telework week in the SME (Small Business Sector) and look forward to helping more and more students find work as well as run their own businesses from their own homes.
Remember that we even offer the opportunity to start your own online training business using our established infrastructure AND if you are looking to start your own business as a bookkeeper (or any business for that matter) we now have the Cert IV in Small Business Management on our Learning System.
The Difference between Public Relations and Marketing
For some reason, marketing and PR are two activities that are often confused with one another. Perhaps that’s because many companies combine their marketing and PR departments, or maybe it’s because people don’t really understand what PR is.
At its most basic PR is the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organisation and it’s public. Marketing, on the other hand, is the business of promoting and selling products or services, which includes market research and advertising.
It’s important to keep these two definitions in mind when undertaking either activity, because if there’s one thing PR is not, it’s selling, which is the ultimate goal of marketing.
That doesn’t mean that PR won’t result in eventual sales, but it shouldn’t be the primary objective of a PR campaign, (although it’s not uncommon for many established PRs to forget this subtle nuance between the two).
If it’s done right, PR is a great way to generate buzz about a new business or product, particularly for small businesses that may not have a huge marketing budget.
Simple Ways You Can Create a Buzz for Your Small Business
For a home-based bookkeeper or virtual assistant just starting out, PR activities to generate interest in your business could include holding an event with other home-based bookkeepers or virtual assistants and inviting local business owners along so you can educate them in the benefits of employing a remote worker.
The goal for an event like this would be to build relationships with your “publics” — people that may come to employ or use your services—but not necessarily to win new business on that particular day.
Alternatively, you could contribute to a few online business publications on what it’s like being a remote worker, or seek opportunities to be quoted in those publications.
Ultimately, that’s the goal of any PR campaign: to gain exposure for yourself or your business by educating and informing first. The selling part comes second, which is where PR differs substantially from marketing, of which the ultimate goal is to promote and sell.
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If you’re a remote worker, why not give your business a PR boost in addition to your regular marketing activities — contact us and tell us your success story. In fact, this very blog is always looking to hear how our students are doing since completing one of our courses, so if you’re now working remotely as a bookkeeper or a virtual assistant, get in touch! It’s great exposure for your business.
If you are a bookkeeper, selling online MYOB training courses to your clients could be the perfect complement to your business.
We’ve mentioned before how we offer enrolment vouchers for our MYOB training courses, which we sell to training organisations and accountants. The idea is that accountants and other trainers can give their customers additional training without having to having to provide the materials and content themselves.
Are you a Bookkeeper? What about Becoming an Online Trainer Too?
But this also presents the opportunity for existing bookkeepers to extend their businesses into the area of online training. We’re looking to partner with existing bookkeepers who would like to provide online MYOB training courses, for which we’d provide the website, tailored to your business needs.
For bookkeepers, this allows you to extend your business beyond just bookkeeping, and use your knowledge and skills to train others in MYOB without having to provide the course content or the necessary infrastructure to facilitate an online training course to your students.
For EzyLearn, it gives us the opportunity to extend our reach and capture a larger pool of students we may not have previously been able to reach. It also fulfils our goal of helping bookkeepers start their own businesses and take control of their careers.
How Does It Work?
Sound interesting? This is how it would work: you register your interest in working with us, and we would have a conversation about your business goals. If both parties are happy to move forward, we’d provide you with a website, tailored to your needs, and sell you the initial stock — vouchers for EzyLearn’s famous MYOB training course, which you would then sell onto your clients.
The end result is a partnership where we provide the materials and infrastructure to operate a training business. What you do after that is entirely up to you. For instance, you might decide to bundle our online training course with one-on-one training, for which you’d charge extra for your time. The possibilities are endless!
Don’t beat yourself up if you get it wrong – all the while you’re learning from your mistakes – which is a darn site better than never having tried at all.
We’ve talked previously about cheating and what’s to be lost by students who cheat, and in particular, what a person has to lose from cheating. Not only do you miss out on learning, you also lose out on the valuable experience of sharing the learning process with others. We believe this is such an important part of the learning experience that we’re even in the process of creating an online community for the students of our MYOB, Word, Excel, and WordPress training courses.
Studying Online? You Can Still Share with Others
When you study online it can sometimes be a lonely business. But we want to change all that, and encourage our students to interact and connect with each other; to share their tips and advice, and make the most of the learning experience.
For people who decide to cheat in their coursework, it’s usually for one reason: they don’t want to fail. But realistically, from the moment they decide to copy someone else’s work, they’ve already failed, but without the valuable experience that comes from trying something and failing: learning.
So you take a test and you get a couple of the answers wrong; at least now you know where you went wrong. It gives you an opportunity to go back over your coursework and try and learn that portion again — or even ask someone.
If you were taking one of our online training courses and you were stuck on a particular portion of the coursework or you got an answer wrong in the test, you can contact someone in the EzyLearn team to help you, or you could discuss the problem with your fellow students, and see how they tackled that question.
Developing the Skill of ‘Problem Solving’
But the important thing is that you’re problem solving; you’re taking steps to resolve a problem. And those problem-solving skills that you employ when you reach a bump in the learning road are invaluable when you operate your own business.
As a business owner you need to be able to problem solve, often on a daily basis. When you reach a problem in your coursework that you’re having difficulty with, by asking questions and talking with others, you’re building up your problem-solving skills, in addition to learning how overcome that particular problem, itself.
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So don’t forget: if you don’t try, you’ll never learn. As business owners, we should exercise our problem-solving muscles from time-to-time, so start now while you’re studying a training course.
If something is free it can lose its value, prompting some students to cheat when given free courses.
In a previous blog we talked about cheating and employing a cheater and how it can be easy to cheat in your coursework by plagiarising someone else’s work. We all know that people who cheat are really only doing themselves a disservice because they haven’t learned the coursework. That’s a big reason why we include tests at the end of each module in our MYOB training courses — to test our students’ knowledge of the coursework, like bank reconciliation.
Testing to Help Learn Properly
We don’t believe our students are cheaters, or that a test will stop someone from cheating (people always find ways to subvert the system if they really want to), but we do believe that it encourages people to really learn and understand the coursework in order to complete the test successfully.
These are the kinds of employees that companies and business owners are looking for and we try to ensure we give our students the opportunity to be the best and most successful they can be.
Free Business Courses for Unemployed Job Seekers
This raised another question for us about the kinds of courses available and the kinds of students they attract. You may already be aware that the Australian Government offers unemployed job seekers the opportunity to complete a business course for free.
This is certainly a great opportunity for those job seekers who, through no fault of their own, found themselves without work, and maybe even without the necessary skills to find gainful employment again. So the Australian Government offering courses to help people learn and develop the skills they need to re-enter the workforce is a great thing.
But in life, there are always those people who are willing to subvert the system. If these people didn’t exist, there’d be no war, we’d have no need for a police force, or a government — John Lennon’s Imagine would, effectively, have come true.
Cheating the System
But the truth is, people do try and subvert the system, everyday. Just recently we met a person who had completed a small business course, which was paid for by the government, and they told us how they had devised a plan to cheat in the coursework. Not only that, they also convinced their other classmates to do the same.
So each person copied content off the internet, or another person’s assignment, and submitted it as their own work. This defied the whole point of setting an assignment, which is to get the student to apply the work they’ve learned in class and demonstrate their understanding of it. By cheating, you’ve demonstrated nothing other than your knowledge of the copy and paste function on your computer.
Learning to Interpret Things
You’ve also missed out on a valuable opportunity to take the coursework and apply it to something yourself, and then receive feedback from a teacher. These are generally exercises that you’ll face in the real world as a business owner, and the point of taking a course is to prepare you for those situations and give you the knowledge you need to handle them. A key aspect of learning is to take in the facts your presented with and interpret them yourself.
The Problem with ‘Free’
Perhaps the reason those students who cheated were willing to do so was because they hadn’t paid for the course out of their own pocket. It was free, so what was the harm?
Steven Levitt and Stephen J Dubner are the authors of the hugely successful book Freakanomics. In the book they explore the hidden side of everything, which they say all comes back to economics because humans respond to incentives — and we’re presented with different incentives virtually everywhere we look.
For instance, there are numerous ways you are incentivised to be a good driver: you don’t get speeding tickets, you won’t lose points off your license, and your insurance company will give you a no-claim bonus. And those incentives each come with their own economic reward.
A person who cheats in a course they didn’t pay for doesn’t really stand to lose anything in economic terms — it didn’t cost them anything to attend the course in the first place, so if they don’t learn anything, they’re no better or worse off.
The Positives of Paying
For a person who paid to attend a course, however, they do have something to lose if they don’t learn anything — the money they paid for the course — and this is their incentive to work hard and make the most of the course; to get more bang for buck.
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That’s why we offer lifetime access in our MYOB training courses. We know you want to make the most of the coursework, to ensure you’re getting the most value for your money and that you’re going to work harder, as a result. For that reason, alone, that’s what makes you more likely to succeed than those people who had a free ride — because you’ve got something to lose.
We all like something for nothing, but sometimes it comes at a cost. In this instance, there is a lot of truth to the expression, nothing ventured, nothing gained. If you don’t put up the money in the first place, you’ve got no incentive to gain anything as a result.
EzyLearn enrolment vouchers: perfect for on-selling to your clients who would benefit from MYOB training.
As Australia’s largest provider of online MYOB training courses, we work with people who are looking to start their own bookkeeping business, find a bookkeeping job and even people who just want to learn how to manage the books for their own business. But did you know we also offer enrolment vouchers?
Who’s A Perfect Candidate for our Enrolment Vouchers?
We sell enrolment vouchers to training organisations and accountants who want to be able to provide their customers and clients with the option of taking an MYOB training course. Our enrolment vouchers are offered at a discounted price when purchased in bulk.
Other Training Organisations
A typical scenario might be a training organisation which buys enrolment vouchers because they don’t offer a MYOB course but think it would be of benefit to some of their students. In this instance, they can purchase vouchers from us, which they can then on-sell to any interested students.
Accountants
For accountants with clients who want to be able to do their own bookkeeping, they can also purchase enrolment vouchers from us and on-sell them to their clients.
Each voucher is valid for 12 months from the date that the training organisation or accountant purchases them, giving you 12 months to sell them to your clients and customers, who also get a further twelve months to use the voucher.
For more information, including pricing, please feel free to contact the EzyLearn team, who’ll be able to answer any of your questions.
The more confident you are in your abilities the less threatened you will feel by the arrival of a newcomer to the workplace.
As part of our MYOB Training Course, we’re constantly adding new content and helping our students win work and improve their employability. That’s why we always emphasise the importance of continuing to educate yourself — for the obvious skills advantages you bring to any company, but also for your own confidence.
For many people, it can be a little nerve racking when new blood enters the workplace and in today’s job market, it’s not at all uncommon to see a new face appear. Sometimes it’s in the form of a new employee there to share your workload and other times it’s because your organisation has employed someone to help restructure the business so they operate more efficiently.
The Many and Varied Threat
For many employees, this new face around the office can make them feel threatened — threatened about the future of their jobs and threatened by the prospect of the office dynamic changing. Fortunately, however, there’s an antidote for this rather common reaction to change: taking a course or continuing professional development.
The thing about feeling threatened is that it’s entirely to do with your confidence. You may feel like you’re not quite as educated or as skilled as this other person and as a result, you think your employer won’t need you any more. The truth is, your employer probably has no intention of letting you go, but nevertheless, the job market is changing and up-skilling to increase your knowledge base is invaluable — to you and your employer.
Confidence in Upskilling and Continuing Professional Development
Aside from the tangible knowledge and experience a highly-skilled employee brings to an organisation, they also bring with them confidence. The more secure you feel with your ability to do your job and do it well, the more confident you’ll feel as a result. For this reason, EzyLearn is a big believer in continuing professional development.
Our MYOB, and Microsoft Word and Excel training courses each come with lifetime access to the course content, so that you can review the course material and even access updated content, whenever you need it.
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A truly confident person would embrace the idea of working with someone new and potentially learning and sharing knowledge, rather than feeling threatened by them. But the key to achieving this confidence is being able to feel secure in your own knowledge base and that’s what EzyLearn’s Continuing Professional Development Program aims to provide bookkeepers with: knowledge.
So stop worrying, stop feeling threatened, and feel more confident in your skills and knowledge by taking one of our online courses today!
Check out the numerous Zoho apps for small business.
It’s fair to say the MYOB is the undisputed market leader in accounting software. Even despite the number of new cloud-based software packages that have sprung up in recent years, MYOB is still the software of choice for most accounts and it’s why we offer MYOB training courses. But for someone starting a new business, MYOB might not actually be the must-have accounting software; there’s a new player in town, offering turnkey solutions for small businesses: Zoho Office Suite.
Cloud-Based Zoho for Small Business
Gone are the days of needing several different, rather expensive, software packages installed on your PC; with Zoho Office Suite you don’t even need one. Entirely cloud-based, the Zoho offering is broken down into three app packages: Zoho Business Apps, Zoho Collaboration Apps and Zoho Productivity Apps.
The Many Zoho Apps
Zoho Business Apps includes CRM, books, invoicing software and a website builder, along with other more ingenious tools such as, the support app for managing your customer service, a custom app-builder tool and a recruitment app that allows you to collect resumes and schedule interviews with candidates.
Zoho Collaboration Apps includes a project management app, a social network app called, Pulse, along with chat, mail and docs apps.
Zoho Productivity Apps features a number of word processing apps, including Writer, Sheet (like Excel), Show (like PowerPoint), Notebook, and a Calendar app.
Select a package and a plan that suits your business needs, pay a small monthly fee, and your business has access to each of the apps within that package whenever and wherever they’re needed. The downside: there’s no pricing plan for all three packages, bundled together.
Zoho Books
But say you don’t want all that anyway; you just want some decent invoicing or bookkeeping software. No worries — each Zoho app is available separately. Zoho Books, which is the closest thing to MYOB and offers unlimited invoicing, expense tracking, reconciliation, time tracking, multi currency support, and the newly added automatic bank feeds and credit card feeds feature, costs only $USD24 per month and includes access for two users.
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For new businesses, Zoho is certainly an affordable option, whether you only sign up for Zoho books, or whether you take on an entire business, collaboration or productivity apps package. For bookkeepers, however, MYOB is still the preferred accounting package. That means training in MYOB is still as necessary and vital a skill as ever.
When you choose to study an online MYOB training course with EzyLearn, you learn every aspect of the MYOB software and how it applies to real-life business and accounting situations. Then, at the end of each module, you complete a test to prove to yourself (and your future employer, even) your knowledge of each module of MYOB, such as payroll, for instance.
There are many people who will argue that tests aren’t necessary; that they’re just an exercise in testing how well you can store lots of information in your short-term memory, then forget it afterwards. They advocate, instead, that you’re marked on how well you performed on your overall coursework, and do away with exams altogether.
[quote]But the thing about an exam is that the better you know your coursework, the better you’ll perform.[/quote]
An exam is designed to taken be taken under pressure. They’re testing your knowledge of things that you are likely to encounter in your day-to-day, and may require you to act immediately. They’re not testing you on something that should be considered at length.
Even though EzyLearn offers lifetime access to our MYOB and Excel training courses, we still expect—in fact, we require it—that our students will pass each test at the end of each of the course modules.
There are a couple of reasons for this:
The first, and this is probably the main reason, is that if you decide to, you can pay an additional fee to receive a certificate that shows you’ve completed and passed our online training courses. This can then be used to show potential employers that you actually know what you’re doing in MYOB—which for many accountants and bookkeepers is either a deal breaker or a deal maker.
But an exam also forces you to study the coursework, whether it’s arbitrarily just to pass the test or thoroughly to make sure you understand and perform well in the test—and this largely depends on your own personal code of ethics. Even if you haven’t done a scrap of coursework before you go to complete a test, the mere fact that you have to complete and pass a test to progress through the course forces you to review the coursework.
It’s easy to cheat in any course by plagiarising someone else’s work. In the academic world, the ramifications involve being awarded an instant fail; in business, it usually involves legal action. But a person’s inclination to cheat and plagiarise someone else’s work raises other ethical questions that those respective punishments don’t address.
I recently attended a networking event and spoke with someone who had completed a Cert IV in Small Business Management at a local BEC (Business Enterprise Centre)- they had completed a Government funded course and used the excuse of having to do the course as quick as they could so they could start their own business. The problem was that this person “encouraged” many of the students to work together (which is a good thing), but they ended up handing in the same assignment and in some situations forgot to change the name on their assignment!
Working together in a group is a fantastic way to learn because everyone has their own strengths and the really smart students can often be good teachers for the slow learners, but to simply replicate another persons work and not even use your own writing style and interpretation is very sad. It’s particularly sad when the Small Business Management course is designed to help you create an individual business plan for your own specific business.
[quote]Our assessors mark every assignment and provide individual feedback to ensure you properly examine your new startup business.[/quote]
This brings us to whether or not you would feel comfortable employing someone who had willfully cheated in a training course. Personally, we wouldn’t. Aside from that person displaying very little work ethic (they couldn’t be bothered to do the work themselves, so cheated instead), it also makes us wonder whether they would behave unethically in other ways—would they take our client base and start-up a rival business?
This is why we test our students at the end of each module, and only those students who receive a passing grade do, in fact, pass the course. It’s not because we think our students will cheat; it’s because we want our students to really learn and understand the coursework, so they can excel and succeed in business.
A common question we are asked about our MYOB courses is if you need to have the software on your computer to do the course. The good news is that MYOB offer a free version of their software for students and trials, it’s called the MYOB Test Drive.
You could do most of the MYOB courses without using the software because we have over 170 MYOB training videos (covering BOTH MYOB version 19 and earlier AND MYOB version 11 and newer – all for the one price). You can also test your skills using our MYOB course knowledge reviews, but there is no substitute for actually using the software as you learn. The biggest thing it will give you is the confidence to say “I’ve done that using the software”.
Our MYOB training workbooks include step-by-step exercises that enable you to perform most of the tasks that are performed at a business so you’ll definitely need to have the software for that. But many students like to replicate what they see in the training videos.
[quote]You can pause the MYOB videos and have a go at replicating it using the free student MYOB software.[/quote]
If you are looking for bookkeeping or accounting jobs you will almost always be asked about your MYOB skills and nothing gives you more confidence than actually using the software.
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…
