Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: training

  • What do we do with displaced workers?

    What do we do with displaced workers?

    As autonomous vehicles get closer to being commonplace, the question now is what do we do with the armies of displaced truck and taxi drivers.

    When Uber founder Travis Kalanick was asked about this earlier this week he suggested that the company may be involved in vocational training for out of work taxi drivers, Tech Crunch reports.

    Kalanick’s suggestion raises a number of interesting possibilities – we may see a training levy placed on the new tech companies to fund vocational colleges or develop a new generation of apprenticeship schemes.

    The question though is what skills would be best for today’s displaced workers to acquire? One idea is to give them training in statistics in an attempt to address the looming shortage of data scientists.

    Another angle could be to train them in programming so they code their way back into the workforce.

    Whatever course we take, nations are going to have to face the need to reskill their workforces. Kalanick’s suggestion should be the start of a larger conversation on how we fund that training.

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  • Driving a horse and cart in a digital economy

    Driving a horse and cart in a digital economy

    “There’s no point in building a highway if no-one can drive” Tasmanian business leader Jane Bennett said about the Australian National Broadband Network during an interview last week.

    Jane was touching on an important point about the digital economy – that most businesses aren’t equipped to deal with it.

    That half of businesses in the US, UK or Australia don’t have a website illustrates that in itself. What’s really worrying is setting up a website is the easy part and has been standard for a decade.

    In many respects this isn’t new, a similar thing happened when mains electricity or the motor car arrived. Many businesses clung desperately to their oil filled lamps and horse drawn carts way past the time these were superseded.

    Well into the 1970s there were hold outs who continued to ply their carts despite the costs of keeping horses on the road being far greater than buying a truck.

    That failure to learn about and invest in new technologies saw all those businesses die, many of them with the owner who’d eked out a living as a milko or rag and bone man for decades.

    On a bigger level, the struggles of the local milkman with his Clydesdale is a worrying reflection of business underinvestment. These folk are stuck with old equipment because they didn’t have the funds to spend on bringing their equipment up to Twentieth Century standards.

    In the 1980s I saw this first hand in some of Australia’s factories. A foreman at a valve manufacturer in Western Sydney boasted to me how he had done his apprenticeship on a particular lathe fifty years earlier.

    That machine still had the belt and pulley assembly from the days when the factory was powered by a steam engine at one end of the plant. It had an electric motor bolted onto it some time in the 1960s but was largely unaltered since.

    It was understandable many Australian factory owners wouldn’t invest after World War II – many industries were protected and property speculation offered, and still does, better returns.

    Another reason for not investing was the sheer cost of buying new equipment, major capital expenditures are risky and for most businesses it wasn’t work taking those risks.

    Today there’s a big difference, hardware and software are far cheaper than they were in the 1960s or 70s with the big investment being in understanding and implementing the new technologies.

    Few businesses don’t have computers or the internet but most of the things we do online are just variations on how our great grandparents worked with documents, filing cabinets and the penny post. We have to rethink how we use technology in business.

    It would be a shame if we find ourselves stuck on the side of the highway wondering what the hell happened in the early years of the 21st Century.

    Stage coach image courtesy of Velda Christensen at http://www.novapages.com/

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  • Reskilling the workforce

    Reskilling the workforce

    One of the core objectives 1980s management philosophy is to shift costs and risks onto others. Staff training is one area that caught the brunt of the drive to slash expenses for short term gain, as a consequence we have a skills crisis with offers opportunities for savvy entrerpreneurs.

    In Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs: Chasing After the ‘Purple Squirrel Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli discusses his recent book that looks at this problem.

    Cappelli’s argument is that companies aren’t offering enough for the skills they desire, they often ask too much of candidates and they won’t train staff.

    In Cappelli’s book, he claims that staff training has plummeted;

    One of your chapters in the book is called “A Training Gap, Not a Skills Gap.” You have some figures showing that in 1979, young workers received an average of two and a half weeks of training per year. By 1991, only 17% of young employees reported getting any training during the previous year, and by last year, only 21% said they received training during the previous five years.

    The predictable consequence of neglecting training for the last thirty years is we now face skills shortages and those responsible – the managers and business owners who refuse to train workers – are now demanding governments do something about it.

    In many ways today’s skills shortages epitomise the short termism of 1980s thinking and how we now find society, and business, is struggling with the long term effects and costs.

    Wherever there’s a problem there is opportunity and there’s a breed of businesses, training companies and workers who will be taking advantage of the failures of the previous generation of managers.

    For those stuck in the 1980s mindset that training, like most staff expenses, is a cost and not an investment they are going to struggle in a world where adding value is more profitable than being the lowest cost provider.

     

    The photo THE BEAD MAKER — Apprentice Watches the Master — A Rosary Shop in Old Meiji-Era Japan was posted to Flickr by Okinawa Soba.

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  • Demystifying Online & Social Media workshops

    Demystifying Online & Social Media workshops

    You need to be where today’s customers can find you. A web site and social media presence are essential for every business.

    The Internet is the new shopfront – our customers, suppliers, staff and anybody who wants to deal with us is checking us out on the web before they contact us.

    Social media is where our customers are talking about us. It’s vital that businesses have a social media presence and know how to use it properly.

    Both a web site and a social media presence are essential for every organisation, but how does a time pressed manager or business owner make sure they are getting the most from their investment?

    The Demystifying Online & Social Media  workshops are two half day sessions. The morning session will show you how you can use various Internet tools to promote your business and products online to the world. The afternoon session will show you how to use social media effectively to service your customers and market your business.

    Business veterans and Internet experts Brad Keeling and Paul Wallbank will guide you through the online tools and techniques which businesses owners and managers can use to improve their Internet performance and effectively extend their web reach to their key customers.

     

    I already have a website

    Even if you have website, it’s essential to be using it properly and making sure it’s leveraging other online channels – it’s now essential the local plumber, lawn mowing service or hairdresser is getting the most from their web presence.

    What will I learn?

    During the workshop participants will develop a cost effective online presence, understand how social media can work for their business and gain insights on strategies to their presence on the web.

    The morning session covers;

    • basic web design essentials
    • choosing keywords
    • using online basic search optimisation strategies
    • making images and video work for your site
    • using free local directory services

    The afternoon session will cover;

    • choosing the right social media tools
    • integrating social media with your business
    • building a social media following
    • dealing with trolls and haters
    • gathering business intelligence through social media

    All of this is explained in basic, commonsense terms and at the end of the workshop you’ll have the knowledge to run a basic but effective online and social media business strategy. A full set of reference notes will be provided to workshop participants.

    If you’re a tradesman, local shop, restaurant, cafe or any other business catering to a neighbourhood, suburb or district these are workshops you cannot afford to miss.

    Location

    Business Growth Centre
    48 Oakdale Road Gateshead NSW 2209 Map

    Date and Time

    Friday, October 26 2012.

    Morning session. Getting the web working for your business – 9am to 12pm
    Afternoon session. Unleashing social media in your business – 1pm to 4pm

    Price

    Single session – morning or afternoon $49.00
    Both sessions – $89.00

    Book now

    Seats are limited so book now through our secure website to guarantee your place at this workshop which no business can afford to miss.

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  • Undoing the untrained workforce

    Undoing the untrained workforce

    One of the notable things about the 1980s way of doing business was how front line workers weren’t valued for their skills and knowledge.

    In call centres, shopping malls and government departments, those who dealt with customers were seen as an unnecessary expense who should be outsourced at the first opportunity or, if it wasn’t possible to hive them off, then encourage them to get more money out of the customer while providing less service.

    An example of this was at electronic superstores where sales staff with little product knowledge were given rudimentary training and then encouraged to sell easy payment plans and expensive acccessories – the HDMI cable scam where connectors of dubious quality earned more profit and commission than the HiFi systems or plasma TVs they plugged into illustrated how lousy a deal this way of doing business for the customer.

    Much of that mentality has been inherited by web2.0 companies that think customer service is an optional extra.

    Some of those companies can’t even be bothered protecting their clients’ data properly, such is their unwillingness to provide service.

    The stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap self service culture of the 1950s and 60s reached its limits in the 1980s and was only given a reprieve by the easy credit boom of the 1990s. With the end of the credit boom, electronic or household goods stores that simply sell cheap tat on interest free terms at a fat mark up without adding value now struggle.

    Gerry Harvey is getting out of electronics partly for this reason – his business model is dead and it’s been difficult for a decade to make the fat profits on consumer computers or electricals without hooking the customers with interest free deals or expensive and pointless accessories or software.

    One of the conceits of management through the last part of the Twentieth Century was the mantra “our greatest asset are our people”, today business have to start valuing the skills, knowledge and corporate memory of their workforces.

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