Quick and Dirty Writing Tips on Podcast
Grammar Girl has a website to help those of us who might be slightly grammatically challenged and her weekly columns on how to master writing tips are also available as podcasts. If you are the point man or woman on the next project to market your department’s training, take a quick look or listen. For many readers, it’s a huge turnoff and shows a lack of professionalism if your marketing and training materials have glaring errors in spelling and grammar.
Summarized Data at Your Desktop
Perhaps you’re tech savvy and already know all about netvibes.com or bloglines.com websites that allow you to upload information from several different sites into one. So you can check your bank and credit card balances, local newspaper headlines and latest business news from a variety of websites all in one fell swoop. Netvibes allows you to go to websites and click on the RSS symbol (rich site summary), input some data and then have the updated information uploaded frequently to your netvibes account. Tap into your netvibes account and the latest data and headlines are all waiting for you on one website. Big timesaver!
Training Budgets Get Increase in 2007
“More organizations are viewing training as a key component to their long-term success, and are increasing budgets to invest in the future,” said Josh Bersin, president of Bersin & Associates. Economic growth, new governmental regulations, and the challenges of an aging workforce have made learning and development a strategic business function. Bersin & Associates conducted a study of 330 corporations in August 2006.
Findings from the report include:
- Organizations of all sizes and across nearly all industries reported higher budgets this year. Overall, training budgets increased an average of seven percent.
- The training budgets of health care companies have shown the greatest increase, up 20 percent over last year. More than 40 percent of health care companies also reported training staff increases this year.
- Technology and financial services companies also reported large budget increases of 10 percent or more. The technology sector has the highest proportion of companies reporting training staff increases (69 percent, but this group also had a fair number reporting staff decreases (23 percent). Pharmaceutical companies also show a mixed story, with 40 percent reporting staff increases and 30 percent reporting staff decreases.
- Instructor-led classroom training continues to be the delivery method of choice, used for 62 percent of all formal training. However, use of self-study e-learning continues to rise, now accounting for 15 percent of all training delivered.
The report also covers how companies are spending their training dollars, which skills are in most demand, and the rise in outsourcing.
