It’s nearly September, but students shouldn’t be the only ones heading back to school. Now might be a good time to take a look at the gaps in your skill base and start to fill them. To get you started, here is a range of course providers that can help you.
Owned by the Open University, and in partnership with many organisations around the world, Future Learn provides online courses as well as access to a range of learning resources from major cultural institutions, such as the British Library and the British Council. The courses are free and divided into different subject areas, for example Business Management and Online and Digital. The site indicates the time commitment required for each course, for example 4 hours per week over a period of six weeks. And each course is facilitated by one of Future Learn’s partners. Example courses include Digital Marketing: Challenges and Insights, Contract Management: Building relationships in business and Intercultural communications.
Good for: academic expertise without the fees
2. Social Media Quickstarter from Constant Contact
Social media is a hugely important part of the marketing efforts of businesses of all sizes. Beyond marketing, the major platforms have also become key focuses for customer service, ecommerce and driving traffic to websites. With so many platforms and strategies to focus on, having a comprehensive one-stop guide that explains everything you need to know about how to get the most out different online mediums is of great help. Cue online marketers, Constant Contact. Their Social Media Quickstarter has a series of chapters that take a more detailed look at different ways of using each channel. For example, Facebook chapters include a Facebook Glossary and How to use your Facebook to grow your email list. In addition to the major sites, other areas covered include blogging, location-based services,ratings and reviews and email plus social media marketing.
Good for: bite-sized advice to conquer all bases of social media and online marketing.
3. Alison
Being an entrepreneur means wearing multiple hats. Even if you own a bakery, you’ll need to be savvy in marketing, design and accounting. You’re even likely to become the IT guy too. So if you’ve been meaning to sharpen up your Adobe skills, learn how to develop your own app, tackle programming or just wanted to refine other areas, like management, then Alison is the site for you. A free online emporium of courses (there are nearly 800); the site offers courses by the world’s biggest publishers, including Microsoft and Macmillan. Each course has flexible assessment and comes with a certification too.
Good for: getting better at balancing all those entrepreneurial spinning plates
4. Open Learn
Another free resource from the Open University, Open Learn provides access to a community of debates and live webinars in the form of the Open Learn Live series. Some courses come with recognised accreditation, others don’t, but each course offers granular modules to help you emerge with new skills in different areas of business (or general interest), with clear learning outcomes to guide your focus. For example, the managing and managing people course has nine modules that include What do managers actually do? and What is managerial effectiveness? Each module builds on from the last to ease you into your chosen area of study.
Good for: step by step, multimedia learning.
5. Udemy
Need to jump to the next stage in your business? But need a little help to make a plan? Cue Udemy, the online learning resource with a mission statement that promises to “help anyone learn anything”. The site boasts over 7 million students, 30,000 courses and over 6.5 million hours of educational video content. Each course scales its programmes according to time and price. For instance, the How to Write The Ultimate 1 Page Marketing Plan comes with 46 minutes of content spread over 11 lectures. Not all the courses are free, but range in price from £7 to a few hundred pounds.
There are thousands more sites and courses to choose from, in many more areas of expertise. The important thing to remember is that with online learning, support and skills are just a click away.
Content on this page is paid for and provided by Kia Fleet sponsor of the Guardian Small Business Network Accessing Expertise hub.
