Educating your employees on how to effectively use the computer software and hardware tools you provide for them should be important to all business owners… especially small business owners. However, it often goes overlooked. Not because of the cost of classroom education, but because of the labor costs associated with having your employees out of the office for dedicated study. In a typical classroom setting, there are students of different skill levels who all learn differently with individual rates of absorption. From my experience, when employers invest in classroom training, the students only retain about 20% of the material covered. Worse yet, they completely forget the material they don’t immediately apply. Additionally, take into account that classes are designed to cover a narrow scope of concepts so that they appeal to a broad audience. All things considered, the opportunity cost of an employee out of the office becomes a much higher expense than the class itself.
In January of 2010 I was neck deep in the COSE Strategic Planning course. I found myself reflecting on the services Acroment provides to our clients. I’m always looking for ways to make our company stand out from our competitors and I began to wonder where we could add additional value to our service offerings.
Until recently, our services have revolved around three basic technology needs that all small businesses have:
- Help desk
- Engineering
- Strategic
What makes us unique is our mission to educate our clients and their employees. We don’t SELL anything – we’re in the service business. Today, we are excited to announce that we are going to “kick it up a notch” with regards to our services. We’re adding a fourth item to the list above.
Introducing… Acrocast – http://www.acrocast.com/. Acrocast is an online training portal provided for FREE to our existing Plan A Platinum customers. We are building up an inventory of short (4-5 minutes) videos which cover very specific computer tasks. The videos are short so that your employees can quickly search for, watch, and apply their new knowledge and get back to work… QUICKLY.
Not only that, but videos are there if they ever need to go back and review them again so there is no pressure to retain the knowledge. The training is practical and covers real-world use of the different features of popular applications such as Word, Excel, and Outlook. In the near future, we will broaden the content to include other applications and even provide services to create custom videos for your own internal applications.
Finally, small businesses have an enterprise class solution to educate their workforce without the waste associated with structured training programs. All Plan A Platinum customers will now receive access to our exclusive on-line training portal known as Acrocast. We’re excited to be able to offer this service and look forward to receiving your feedback. Enjoy your training!