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It’s the New Year – Resolve to Start that New Small Business Today! – free success tip video

It's never too early to make the resolve to start your own business - don't put it off any longer!
It’s never too early to make the resolve to start your own business – don’t put it off any longer!

If you or someone you know is looking to start a new business, up skill to provide additional services to existing clients, or partner with us to build a training business, our Small Business Management Course provides you with essential information for operating a new small business.

We also offer online courses in Reach Accounting, Xero, and of course, our flagship MYOB course as well as online courses in Microsoft Office (Word and Excel). You may recall from a previous post that we sell enrolment gift vouchers for our online training courses, so if your friend or family member (or even yourself) has been seriously considering starting a new small business, why not help make 2014 the year that dream becomes reality by giving them an enrolment voucher!

Small Business Management Course at Last Year’s Price

Since it’s still the festive season, we’re giving you the opportunity to lock-in your 2014 Small Business Management Course at 2013 prices.

As you complete each module within our Small Business Management Course, you’re working your way towards writing the business plan for your business, which you can then use to secure financing or as a model for the future growth of your business.

We take you through every facet you’ll face when it comes to owning and operating a small business, from researching the market and undertaking market activities, through to customer service.

Our Small Business Management Course includes training videos featuring real-life business owners, so you can see how each module practically applies to a real-world small business. Take, for instance, the video below with David Hall, the ‘Customer Service King’ and Director of Sydney’s The Clean Plumber.

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The New Year is the time for making resolutions — resolve to start your new small business today and enrol in our Small Business Management Course! Or if you’d like to gift a training course to your friend or family member, contact us and secure your 2014 training courses at 2013 prices!

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What’s Your Learning Style?

Humans all have different ways of learning and absorbing information. Which style are you?
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.

Why not read first about kinaesthetic learners — could this be you?

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LinkedIn Profiles: What Not To Do

620_300_cropIf you are like me, or pretty much any other living, breathing person on the planet with access to the Internet, then you’ve probably Googled someone in the last 24 hours.

Actually, I Googled someone while writing this post; had a gander at their LinkedIn profile and then went about the rest of my business.

I’ve mentioned previously how a LinkedIn profile works in shaping a person’s opinion of you, but how do you ensure it’s shaping a person’s opinion of you in the right way?

Getting Mileage Out of Your LinkedIn Profile

If you’re a jobseeker and you need to overhaul your LinkedIn profile, then some things to avoid:

Lying: Lie on your resume à la ex-Yahoo CEO, Scott Thomson, and you’re running the gamut of being found out at some point; lie on your LinkedIn profile and you will definitely get found out (either by a colleague or former employer), but lie on your CV and not your LinkedIn profile: now you’re not only a liar, you’re also a stupid one!

It’s simple: don’t lie. Ever.

Too many recommendations: if a prospective employer is scoping you out — perhaps to verify some of the claims in your CV or interview — and you don’t have any recommendations it’s likely they’ll consider you a dud networker, or worse: a dud employee.

To remedy this, send out a few recommendation requests. But don’t overdo it (when you’re job hunting, for example) — a slew of recommendations all at once makes it obvious you’re job hunting, which your current employer may not think too highly of.

Your job description is vague: maybe you think it’s mysterious, but vague or ambiguous statements in your job description is just plain elusive, and it makes you seem as though you’ve something to hide. Like maybe you’re not as fabulous as you let on you are.

The statement “assisted with the grand opening of a new store” could mean anything. For all we know, you could have put out the plastic cups people were drinking their complementary bubbles from. Instead, write what you actually did. No matter how small the task was.

No photo: this isn’t a beauty contest, nor is it the correct medium to post a picture of yourself drinking from a seven-foot beer bong. But the option to upload a picture is there for a reason.

A picture tells a thousand words and like it or not, visuals are important. If they weren’t, we’d never have to go for an actual job interview.

Ambiguous keywords: choose your keywords wisely; avoid overused buzzwords like “proven track record” or “team-player”. They may sound impressive (to you) but they really aren’t.

Instead of saying you have a proven track record in sales, show people what that proven track record was — if you pitched and won a multi-million dollar account for your company, say that. This turns an empty statement into a quantifiable accomplishment.

We work with professional partners that help combine our online training courses with services that help you to improve your chances of employability, or hone their talents and skills for running a small business. If you’re new to LinkedIn, we’ve discussed in a previous post how you can use your LinkedIn profile as your resume to find work. If you are looking for opportunities to become an independent contractor and operate your own business from home see the business opportunities at Workface.