The Institute for Digital Business Strategy is a new online school with the aim of helping executives in Africa and other continents to manage the process of realigning their strategies in the face of digital disruption.
Forbes is angling for a bite of the Continuing Professional Education market with learn.forbes.com, its new eLearning platform launched June 6. Aspiring professionals, the bedrock of Forbes’ readership, can now choose from 60-plus self-paced online courses focused on leadership, entrepreneurship, business, IT, sales and cybersecurity.
What is the real value of an MBA? The skills developed, or the prestige of the issuing institution? For those seeking to add an MBA to their resume, their answer to that question will make the difference between spending thousands of dollars and spending no dollars at all.
In manufacturing, one measure of the efficiency and quality of a process is its sigma rating – which can refer either to yield or the percentage of defect-free products it creates. The number in front of the sigma symbol (σ) indicates where the process’s output lies on the bell curve of standard deviation. 1σ is terrible, with 69% of products coming off the production line with defects – a massive waste of resources. 2σ would see around a 31% defect rate. 3σ would be about 7%.
Business is all about calculated risk. The key word there is ‘calculated’. In order for a business to prosper in the long term, it needs to identify, quantify and manage the risks it faces. In the mind of the astute businessperson ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ is not a rhetorical question. If it IS used as a rhetorical question, it often heralds disaster in the same way as the words ’Here, hold my beer!’ often herald some kind of pratfall that delights YouTube viewers.
The #MeToo movement has brought all forms of sexual harassment into the spotlight and there has been a corresponding spike in subscriptions to online workplace harassment training videos and eLearning courses for staff training.
The American Museum of Natural History is an incredible place to visit – it’s one of the largest museums in the world, occupying 2 million square feet. But it’s a lot more than a museum. It’s a national center for learning and research about the natural world. It has one mission statement: ‘To discover, interpret, and disseminate—through scientific research and education—knowledge about human cultures, the natural world, and the universe’.
FutureLearn is a massive open online course (MOOC) learning platform launched and wholly owned by the Open University in the UK. It offers online programs from leading universities in the UK, Australia & New Zealand, China, and several European countries. Courses are delivered one module at a time and are accessible on mobile, tablet and desktop. When all (free) courses in a Program are completed, the learner buys a certificate, passes a final assessment and earns an award.
Online advertising is a zillion-dollar industry. From AdWords to clickbait, it permeates our online lives as it tries to conjure everyone’s credit cards out of their wallets. As it matures it is creating new career opportunities as brands seek to maximise their online impact. Anyone with a sales & marketing background finds themselves increasingly embroiled in the online arms race. Some pick up the skills along the way, while others can benefit from some training. If Buffer, Mailchimp, CPC and BuzzSumo are foreign words to you, read on.
60% of our waking hours are spent at work. But just being there is no guarantee of productivity. On the best days, we feel energized, motivated and productive, and we get plenty done. Yet how many of those good days we have depends a lot on our state of physical and mental wellbeing. In 21st Century Western society, managers can’t just yell ‘Faster! Faster!’ at employees until they drop from exhaustion. They have to be more forward-looking and do whatever they can to keep their workforce happy and healthy. Healthy staff are productive staff, and that’s good for the bottom line.
Have you ever imagined yourself cast away on an island or lost in the jungle for weeks on end? How would you survive? What would you eat, seeing as shrink-wrapped supermarket produce would be in short supply? You'd have to forage and eat what you found.
