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customer service guru

How I Became a Customer Service Guru in 6 Months

  I was the most unlikely person to be in customer service. Let’s face it. If you’re painfully shy, the last job you want to be stuck with is one where you’re constantly assisting people with complaints. Yikes! But I was in college and desperately needed a job. Trial by Fire The first couple of… Read more »

OpenSesame Test Drives the Social Workplace

OpenSesame is using Yammer. I confess that I didn’t think we needed a tech solution to communication and collaboration. After all, we’re a relatively small and very collaborative team. When I have a question, I say it out loud and someone answers me. But we are strong believers in understanding emerging technologies by using them.  Clearly,… Read more »

More than Compliance Training

Compliance Training: Tips for Training

Making professional learning and development a priority requires a commitment of time, staff resources and financial investment. Some companies simply don’t have the resources to spare to ensure that their employees have opportunities to develop new skills and knowledge. More than Compliance Training: Tips for Personal Growth When Your Company Won’t Help If your company… Read more »

The Top 10 eLearning Topics for 2011

The Top 10 eLearning Topics for 2011

OpenSesame is building an online marketplace for buying and selling off-the-shelf elearning courses. As we work with course developers, the most common question we hear is, “What courses are in demand?” Here is the product of our latest research. Make these the fodder for your New Year’s resolutions! The Top 10 eLearning Topics for 2011… Read more »

Tips on Researching and Organizing Content

Tips on Researching and Organizing Content

Good design and user interface is only half the battle of creating memorable and effective elearning courses.  The other half is making sure that your course contains meaningful information that will produce results for learners.  We have some tips on editing and organizing content for course creators who are partnering with subject matter experts or… Read more »

10 Useful Things I Learned This Year

10 Useful Things I Learned This Year

To celebrate the approaching year-end, I compiled a list of ten useful things I’ve learned and added to my toolkit in 2010.  1.  How easy it is to make useful videos with a webcam, Screenr, iMovie and a quiet room. 2.  Closed networks & organizational silos = closed minds. 3.  There’s a technical term for… Read more »

Computer security training

6 Critical Areas Requiring Cyber Security Training

Every computer system is vulnerable, some more than others. But you don’t need to resort to creating your own operating system or to severing all ties with the outside world in order to create an acceptable level of cyber security. All too frequently, the weakest links in the chain of security are the users. Surfing… Read more »

How to Create Great eLearning Courses: An Overview

How to Create Great eLearning Courses: An Overview

OpenSesame is a marketplace for connecting the buyers and sellers of elearning courses.  We want to reach beyond the market of the existing elearning developers and offer growth opportunities to designers with little experience with elearning courses or subject matter experts new to designing training courses.  To that end, we’ve created an overview of the… Read more »

Everything That Can Be Social, Will Be

Everything That Can Be Social, Will Be

In the first two posts in our Content Revolution series, we discussed how entertainment and information content is becoming digital and chunked. This post will discuss the third component of the content revolution: the social layer. For some, social media is a procrastination activity. For others, it’s a business strategy. Throughout the applications of social… Read more »

Good Thoughts from #lrnchat on Being a Department of One

Good Thoughts from #lrnchat on Being a Department of One

#lrnchat is a weekly Twitter-based discussion among the community of training and elearning professionals. It occurs twice each Thursday, at 11:30-1pm EDT and then again at 8:30-10pm EDT. While structured as a collaborative discussion on the theory and practice of leading learning, the chat has its own ecology of peers and friends who provide thought-provoking… Read more »

The Future of Open Source CMSs like Joomla in eLearning

The Future of Open Source CMSs like Joomla in eLearning

The integration between content management systems (CMS) and learning management systems (LMS) and use of popular open source CMS as an alternative to complex LMS is a hot topic. The benefit to a CMS-centered solution is full integration. It’s more convenient to have your eLearning system as an integral part of your business portal regardless… Read more »

Sexual harassment

Sexual Harassment Training is Vital in Business

Sexual harassment is a form of bullying. This is why most, if not all, major companies include this subject as an integral part of their corporate training. Do you know what appropriate and inappropriate behavior is? You may be surprised and even shocked to learn how many people do not. One study found that 22%… Read more »

communication training

The Basic Types of Communication Training

Does your work entail interacting with people all the time? Do you do a lot of writing, such as memos, press releases, and statements on behalf of your organization? Are you frequently in front of crowds to deliver speeches or talks? If so, online communication training might be what you need to make your experience a… Read more »

communication training

5 Ways You Can Benefit from Customer Service Courses

  People today demand world-class customer service. They want the companies they deal with to provide outstanding support, relevant advice, and useful information related to the products and services that are offered. If they receive a mediocre or half-hearted response from the customer service team, they will look elsewhere. It is important for businesses to… Read more »

sales training

How I Went from Sales Newbie to Sales Guru in 6 Months

If you’re not a people person, becoming a master of sales could prove to be impossible. You have to love people and be able to relate to them. Sales training, of course, is crucial, but developing a thick skin for rejection remains of paramount importance. Why? Because you need to remain highly motivated. Let me… Read more »

Everything That Can Be Granular, Will Be

Everything That Can Be Granular, Will Be

Our previous post Everything That Can Be Digital, Will Be examines the migration of corporate training from traditional instructor-led training to elearning in the context of the digitization of other forms of media, like news, television and music. The conclusion from the data is obvious: Content that can be digital, whether news stories or songs, will… Read more »

The Importance of Teamwork Training

One of the greatest industrialists the world has seen, Henry Ford, once said something about teamwork: Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success. Despite the different times we live in today, the basic principles behind teamwork still remain true. Whether your team is composed of two people, a department or… Read more »

humor at work

Humor on the Way to the Bottom Line

  In business, success isn’t just everything; it’s the only thing. Achieving that success can prove deadly serious and that causes stress. So to relieve some of that stress, take a short breather to recharge your humor cells and your funny bone. Don’t be surprised if you learn something in the process. Laziness People can… Read more »