remembering 9/11

"

Some Awful Truths by the Numbers

• 2,992 people died on September 11, 2001
• 6.75 years it took to build the World Trade Center
• 102 minutes it took to destroy both towers from impact to collapse
• 12 seconds it took each tower to crumble
• 343 Firefighters who died at the WTC
• 23 NYPD officers who died trying to save others"  by Jeff Bullas

How to Sell Your CEO on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Today

Here is a 7-step process to convince your CEO to start social media marketing:
Do Your Homework
As any good sales person can tell you, doing your homework before you get in the meeting can make the biggest difference interms of success. You need to study your CEO like a must-have customer. This means knowing his demographic, BANT and behaviour patterns. Did he come up through marketing or sales, or maybe it was through operations or finance? If he is from a sales and marketing background, talk to him about how research from HubSpot finds that companies that blog welcome an average of 55% more visitors to their sites than companies that don’t. And they may generate 97% more external website links and 434% more indexed pages, both of which influence a company’s search rank. On the other hand, if your CEO comes from a finance background, show him how a recent global survey by McKinsey of about 1,700 corporate executives finds that 69% of respondents claim measurable advantages from social media, including a lower cost of doing business, better access to knowledge, increased marketing effectiveness, insight for developing more innovative products and services, and higher revenues

ES Computer Training Introduces Laureen

My name’s Laureen and I am a freshman employee of ES Computer Training.  I’m fairly new to the world of blogging and am currently learning the ropes with respect to Social Networking in order to provide you with a wealth of information that will hopefully enrich your lives (at least from nine to five).

Today, I have covered a lot of ground and thanks to my mentor, Anne, (without whom I would have had a considerably more difficult time navigating through the learning process) I’m finding the world of Social Networking to be most enlightening, interesting and , yes, even fun!

I have thoroughly enjoyed my first day here at ES Computer Training and I look forward to many more and lots & lots of blogging.

Talk to you soon!

Finance, Futures and a Bed and Breakfast in Costa Rica

Today I met a financial planner who has made it, is truly successful.  She owns a bed and breakfast in Costa Rica at the age of 50.  The idea of financial planning in Toronto and escaping to Costa Rica (a 5 hr direct flight) is intriguing.  How did she do it?  From scratch:  found a builder, found property, architect, photos, ... and did it!  This was extremely adventurous since she doesnt speak Spanish and Costa Rican builders dont speak English (in general!).  Anne's travelled a lot and Costa Rica stood out as a good location.  Health care is good and dentists are American trained!.  Teeth cleaning is $10!  A dinner out is $7 with wine.  Never met anyone that didnt love it.  There are also lizards, iguanas and howler monkeys and white faced monkeys, anteaters, sloths, snakes.  A tarantula visits everyday.  Tarantulas mate for life.  Dont squish them.  You are making someone really miserable if you do!
Incredible adventure Anne. Anne M. Thomson on Facebook.  annemthomson@yahoo.ca

Reflections on creating a business

There are 3 rules when starting a business,   find a market, service that market with a product, and make a profit.  If you only accomplish the third one, drop the first two, you are doing fine.  If you only accomplish the first two, consider registering as a charity!  No wait, even they do better than this.  Without a profit, its just a hobby.  The hard part is doing something well enough that other people will buy your services or products with their hard earned time and /  or money. 

If I were writing about hockey right now, I would have just told you that you have to put the puck in the other teams net, more times than they put their puck in yours!  Its that simple and that hard! 
Thats why only a few can do it!

King Charles - Love Lust

training strategies for computer skills and office efficiency

A.              Training Strategies

Classically, training was considered the poor cousin of technical support.  A technocrat would be given the training manual and would begin reading the book before class.  They would flip to a page and present the software features as written and instruct the students to do the work again as written.  The instructor would be a good enough technocrat to figure out most questions or problems.  The students learned some features but little application to their work environment.

To rectify this sub-standard situation, ES Computer Training introduced two policies.  The first was the policy of determining before-hand what applications interested students and preparing exercises to illustrate those applications.  To accomplish this, we introduced a survey and interview policy prior to offering training. 

The second policy was to ensure instructors thoroughly versed in the software and had used the products in a variety of industries.  The instructors act as a workshop leaders and present applications of the software, quirks and shortcuts to the students.  The instructor brings to the class, years of experience in training and using the software in a variety of corporate settings, companies, educational and government organizations.  The anecdotal and application approach allow ES Computer Training classes to be recognized by the attendees as the best software training that they have taken.  

Over the past 2 decades, ES Computer Training have become recognized experts in Computer Skills Training and Adult Learning.  Essential components for successful mastering of computer skills are incorporated into each of the training workshops that we offer.   These components include

1.      Hands on instruction:  All students are provided with a laptop for use during instruction.

2.      Instructor led – The most efficient way to master a concept includes timely access to an instructor to ask questions and solve difficult problems.

3.      Practice problems – Multiple practice problems to develop and reinforce concepts are provided.

4.      Development of concepts – To develop and reinforce understanding concepts are developed on a gradient scale,  from simple to complex in actual spreadsheets.

5.      To address the variety of learning types, visual learners can watch the development of concepts demonstrated by the instructor, auditory learners listen to the instructions provided by the instructor.  Students who read and take notes to master concepts are provided handouts. Kinesthetic learners work on the problem sets in class with immediate feedback from the instructor.

Material is discussed, demonstrated.  Students then work on the exercises at their own pace.  Examples are done independently so that each student works at their own pace.  Instead of just copying, students must think through the concepts to  master them.  The instructor has the opportunity to walk around and provide one-on-one help while students work on the problem sets.