Quality Education

7 Reasons Professionals Need An EBook

May 28, 2022 Comments Off

For the past fifteen years or so, companies in most industries have been trying to cut back and eliminate their reliance on internal employees. This has had a number of effects on managers in those companies.
But for professionals seeking a job with those companies the effect has been nothing but negative.
Most professionals deal in technical knowledge. Whether that knowledge is accounting, IT, legal or even sales and marketing it has a heavy technical component. Unfortunately, that means that identifying and rating skill requires an equivalent technical knowledge. For that matter even interpreting one’s resume requires an equivalent technical knowledge.
Unfortunately, as companies reduced staff, technical managers became busier and busier. It became necessary to offload the search for employees to HR who were not trained or capable of making the appropriate technical evaluations. The result has been a steadily deteriorating professional job market.
So what’s a poor professional to do?
EBooks are one solution that every professional should consider. Here are seven reasons that every professional should consider writing eBooks.
1. Resumes no longer work if they ever did work. Bluntly resumes are designed to log the work you’ve done. They do nothing to convince people that you can do the job. Or that you have the skills that they need.
2. Managers are too busy to be as involved in the hiring process as they should. As we’ve discussed already technical skills are needed to evaluate and interpret resumes of professionals. Skills are often interchangeable and often related or counter-indicated. Unfortunately, HR recruiters are typically unable to properly interpret resumes for technical staff.
3. Business cards get lost or are misplaced. And after a while they all tend to look the same. eBooks help you to create a true differentiation between yourself and other professionals.
4. After a while everyone looks the same. As a professional you need to differentiate yourself from everyone else who is applying for the same position. The technique is called personal branding. EBooks are one way of ensuring that you have differentiated yourself.
5. eBooks can establish credibility by providing an example of your work. Unlike resumes which simply list the work you have done, eBooks demonstrate those skills.
6. eBooks establish expertise and knowledge in a particular field. Because they are an example of the use of the skills and knowledge they are more likely to be received and believed than a resume.
7. eBooks establish the ability to apply knowledge. One of the issues that professionals face is that having the knowledge isn’t enough. In fact, having too much knowledge of a particular area can lead to that well known phenomenon of “ten years of experience or one year repeated ten times”. What every employer wants is the ability to actually apply the knowledge which every professional is supposed to have. An eBook helps prove that you have the ability to apply knowledge to a specific problem.

Productivity and Innovation – 5 Critical Questions Every Business Owner Should Ask

April 25, 2022 Comments Off

I was speaking with a friend and fellow business owner a short time ago who’s going through some growth transition issues. He’s improved his customer service practices and a key employee just couldn’t embrace the changes and keep up.

After waiting too long (his words) he reluctantly made the needed change and replaced a long standing employee with a new person. He has a small business with only 6 employees so any personnel issue has huge ramifications. All in all he did a great job smoothing the exit of the employee and allowing for the relatively easy entrance of the replacement.

About a week into things he called the new employee in and gave him a ‘project’. The mission was simple, pay very close attention to the business process, work flow, communication both with clients and in the office and look for problems, issues and bottlenecks. This is a great idea for any of us. He basically recruited his new employee to function as an internal consultant looking at his business with ‘new eyes’. Now realize that this is not a witch job is to look at practices and policies not to spy on fellow co-workers and then tattle.

I suggested that he expand this practice one more step and I shared with him an idea that I’ve used, as a consultant in company after company that I’ve worked with but also as a technique that I’ve used to grow my own businesses.

Ask the 5 Critical Questions.

The process is simple, simply sit down with your employees, ideally one on one, and out of the office for a candid discussion. The larger the company the harder this is to do, so in large companies small groups of 5-10 people might be the best you can do. In a small business, coffee, lunch, breakfast, any 30-45 minute session works. This is not an excuse for dinner with the good looking employee and should never involve heading to a bar…I’ve found a diner works best. Let everyone know this is coming ahead of time so they aren’t shocked and let them know that you really want to hear from them, both the good and the bad.

Try to schedule all of the meetings in as short a period of time as possible to avoid ‘meeting cross contamination’. If not all of the usual stuff will crop up in water cooler talks, “What did you say?”, “What should we ask for?”, “What did he/she want to know?” Try to minimize this as much as possible if you want the best information.

Once you have the meeting, get to know your employee a little better and then ask the 5 Critical Questions…I have found that asking them in this order works you ask for good stuff first they’ll gloss over the bad stuff.

What are we as a company doing poorly?

What am I, or what is management, doing that gets in your way?

What are we as a company doing well?

What can I, or management do, do to make your job easier?

And the $Million dollar question… “If time and money were not factors, what would you STOP, START or CHANGE that can help us do better for our clients?’

He took my idea and in a period of three weeks was able to have a meeting with everyone. Part of the feedback about the process…”The level of communications with our employees is at an all time high, and both the volume of output has increased while the quality has increased exponentially at the same time. Another benefit is that all of our employees are finally taking ownership, freeing me to actually grow the business.”

Ideas that have come out of other companies who’ve tried it:

Wholesales changes to archaic customer service practices

Creation of project bid teams made up of marketing, sales and service reps to insure workable delivery deadlines

Changes to purchasing patterns resulting in significant cost savings

Employee/management teams that collaboratively created specs for capital equipment purchases

Creation of an award winning client service website

New and different marketing ideas

Development of new profit centers

A renewed sense of purpose after employees knew they were being listened to

Give it a shot, you have a lot to learn and you’ll have an opportunity to develop better relationships with your team.

You have nothing to lose, you have to eat anyway but trust me, the knowledge you’ll gain will make these meals some of the best money you’ve ever invested into your business.

The Importance of Having Knowledge About the Web Tools

June 5, 2021 Comments Off

Once, internet was so new and innovative that only few people had access to it. Most of the people even didn’t know about it.
In early times it was just like pair or combination of words, but as the time passed and people got more awareness about it, it became one of the most useful things people would have ever thought about.
If you have knowledge about the web tools, it can be very helpful. The basic we tools are easy to use just if you get a little of the knowledge. These are not difficult once you get your mind start working in them. The tools available today are much specialized, though many of them are very multifarious and complex.
The point is that many of the tools which we used to see and use are just useless these days as new and better tools have come up to the scene. This would also be not wrong to say that most of the tools that are used today may be unavailable in coming times as they would get better and specialized in coming days. This is true that the coming times may be more specialized than we have ever have thought about.
As we all know that there are some basic web developer languages that must be known by a developer, they include HTML, CSS, PHP, etc. it must be kept in mind that all of these are different from other and for the best use of each of it. A person must be familiar with the finished product which these programs are capable of making.
For all these you must install a web server to your personal computer. This process is neither difficult nor harmful for your computer nor will you have the need of networking.
So, this is completely safe as no other computer would be attached to your computer.

Help Desk Software Can Improve Your Online Business

April 23, 2021 Comments Off

Nobody likes a dumb question. This includes the members of your online business team who ensure that customer complaints are met with helpful answers. Unfortunately, most customers are so excited to use their new product that they neglect to educate themselves with the user manual. These same frustrated customers will call support with questions that are easily answered, tying up the phone lines as customers with more complex complaints anxiously wait.
However, there is a solution – it’s called help desk software or customer support software. This software is designed to either help customers help themselves or to assist customers in contacting technical support. There are a couple ways that help desk software accomplishes this task.
Most customer support software will include a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ). An FAQ is a relatively short list of some of the most common questions that are asked of customer support and their answers. When customers first use help desk software, they should be exposed to a program or self-help list which will attempt to answer their questions before they ever get a chance to make a call.
Most major retailers are performing this task today by funneling customers needing support into a short questionnaire or troubleshooting session, handled by software, which will either answer the customer’s question or display contact information for phone support.
There is another option which separates the customer from costly phone support – text support in the form of chat messaging and email. The email option allows support teams to handle customer questions on their own time, allowing for more efficiency in handling complaints. It also allows more severe complaints to be handled before all others as support employees can choose which complaints they address first.
Chat messaging does not offer this triage effect for severity of complaints, but it does connect customers and support employees in a way that minimizes wait times and confusion. When on the phone, poor connections and differing accents can result in many poorly transmitted messages causing confusion and frustration. However, text is always clear and, in most cases, understood.
So you see, help desk software can do wonders for your company’s online business. While your competitors’ support teams are gridlocked with customers asking simple questions, you can educate your customers on how to use your product without even answering a complaint.
As your competitors’ support teams struggle to hear customers with bad cell phone reception or different accents than their own, your support employees will be sending satisfied, educated customers on their way. In business it all boils down to who can provide the most value to their customers. By contemplating adding help desk software to your online business, you may give your company the edge it needs to outclass the competition.

Pub Quizzes – Writing Your General Knowledge Questions

October 20, 2020 Comments Off

Many pub quizzes fails because of the way in which the questions are written and the topics that are chosen. Some quizzes fail because they focus far too much on one particular topic, others because the questions are not challenging enough. Of course you don’t want to have to have a PhD in the topics to even be close to being able to answer the questions so get a good balance.

Below is a quick guide on what the quiz master should be looking for on quality questions and answers.

Most pub quizzes have a spread out age groups from different walks of life so be sure to accommodate the majority when setting your questions and answers.

Topics and Subjects. Most quizzes have general knowledge, handout and specialist topics rounds in them. General knowledge should be a wide variety of topics that covers general every day things and events. Picking the questions from different eras and topics in an even split is the best way. Look for History, Geography, Music, TV and Films and Science as a good grounding but also try to get some local themed questions as well. Questions of a particular subject should be kept set similar always taking into account where possible a difference of age group and interests. You should try and avoid the same people answering and enable the rest of team member to answer questions.

Difficulty of Questions. This is very important but generally the easiest way is make several questions that are easy, quite difficult and more tasking questions that way you get a nice selections within the quiz. When compiling the actual pub quiz split these up evenly in to general knowledge rounds. If doing a specialist topic then split the mix of question difficulty levels within the round.

Quality question and answers – Making questions enjoyable isn’t that difficult but you need to follow some simple rules.

Pub quiz teams should be able to discuss, argue and throw answers out to each other, they can be challenging but not impossible to guess. Make sure that when compiling questions you look at ways to make them chance of guessing when possible.

The question has to hold their interest if it doesn’t then the team members will more than likely not have a clue about the answer. If the team gets the answer wrong they will want to be able to go away with something new. Something they can quiz their friends with the next day or so.

Keep the questions in the public domain with seldom going into the realms of obscure. The more bizarre the questions the more likely you are to put quiz goers off coming again. Not to say you can’t have a couple spread about the quiz.

Hopefully this quick guide will help you compiling questions and answers for your pub quiz.

My Own Logo Design Process

June 26, 2020 Comments Off

The start is always the hardest part. When I started seven years ago, I found logo design tiring, complicated, and never thought that rejection is a normal thing here in this profession. Although through the years, I had slowly learned that these tedious processes will shape me to the designer I am supposed to become.
Design process is relative. It depends on the designer’s background or preferences. Designers from art schools are generally process oriented, or they tend to follow the basic steps, designing the textbook way. Ouido designers like me usually have a different approach to the design process, and our approach vary according to our background, to how we started as designers.
In my case, I really do not have one standard way of approaching a design process. It depends on the client and the project. Yet my usual design process is divided into three parts: understanding the clients’ needs and niches, sketching, and conceptualization.
Learn and understand the client, the client’s niche.
Typically, it is hard to please clients without knowing what pleases them. As a commercial designer, you should always start the design process with your clients and it should end with them as well.
Understanding your client’s industry is the best way to begin a logo design process. It is a requirement you have to experience as a designer. Knowing the client’s business from root to top, from rudiments to its broader industry functions, help build the foundation of the design process. Normally, you have to focus on their goals (mission and vision), their social stand (advocacies, company beliefs, affiliate organizations) and their history as a business, because logos are virtual representations of these things.
Put your interest to their niche. Understand it deeply and relate it to their goals as a business. Learning all these things will avoid future logo demise and criticisms.
You should then get your clients’ ideas, their wants, suggestions, and needs. It is their prerogative if they wish to be part of the design process; yet as a designer, it’s your responsibility to align their wants (taste, likings, requirements) to the principles of logo design (simplicity, relevance).
Start sketching
Now, it is time to use all the information you have gathered from the initial step. Start putting your own interpretation on a blank paper through sketching. Do not limit yourself in drawing ideas from your mind. Do not use rulers and measuring tools just yet. Just do the freehand drawing, as if you are only playing. Just draw until you get tired of it.
Conceptualization, main design
The main part of conceptualization comes after sketching. Here, you will organize your sketches and come up with solid logo ideas with measurement, contrast, and typeface in mind. This process is not like, and very different from, sketching. In design, conceptualization is the process of putting your initial ideas to actual logo designs or final products. This is the part where you adhere to your client’s needs, and where you combine this adherence with your design knowledge and inclination without crossing the borders of their corporate beliefs and goals. This is therefore, the real job, where you combine your talent with your client’s needs to come up with one final design.
Normally, clients require designers to submit at least three to ten design concepts to choose from. Some companies have these designs for internal company voting, polls, and surveys to have an idea of its efficiency and recall for the people. From here, they will suggest criticisms, revisions, and even make rejections.

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