Training and Skills Development

Training Requirement

If you are a prospective partner, it is important for you to know the skills of the people you are going to be working with. So in this article, I will discuss our training and skills development.

Nick requires that we devote 20% of our time on skills training and development. This allowed the team to not only become productive. It also sated each member’s natural desire to improve on their craft and learn new skills.

If you think about it, it is an ingenious plan – a win-win situation. For employees to be happy, they need to feel they are growing within the organization and that their skills and competencies are being put to good use. Contrary to popular belief, financial rewards actually only come secondary. For the business, it meant the employees are improving which makes them more capable of handling more diverse projects.

Magento Product Management

When I started working for Nick, he put me on trial for one month. I was like a young buck venturing for the first time in the wild. My first task was to write articles for him for one of his websites so he can assess my capabilities and that was finished without much of a hitch. Nick then decided to give me a task of adding products to the Magento e-commerce platform. That sounded overwhelming because I was not yet familiar with the platform but I was given a process to follow. I started with simple products, soon after I already found myself working on the more complicated grouped products and configurable products. After more than a year, I was not only limited to the product catalog tab in Magento. Currently, Nick already considers me an expert on Magento product management and sends me all the product related tasks for IOTA and GardenWare. He told me that:

…when you become an expert at something, you should stop doing it; train someone else to do it; and become an expert at something else.

Design

Currently, I am quite well versed in the WordPress content management system and working on nickj.co just furthered what I currently know about WordPress design elements. Still, it’s going to be a while before I am capable of creating a full-scale web design all on my own. There are still a lot of things that I need to grasp.

Learning how to code in different programming languages is going to be a very big challenge for me and it is interesting for me so that helps. For the time being, I have a few things I am polishing up my skills on. I am also learning the basics of programming which will prepare me for CSS or Javascript. I think Nick wants me to go into the direction of CSS which I think is the reasonable option since I deal with a lot of pages and learning how to manipulate CSS elements will help a lot.

Project Management

As project manager and team leader, it’s helpful but it isn’t really a necessity for me to gain a mastery of technical skills. I just need to at least grasp the core concepts to be able manage projects effectively. I kind of consider myself as being a little technical and a little creative. I am neither a master of the creative nor the technical aspect but I know enough of both to manage tasks effectively. Though I am trying to get my foot into the technical bandwagon.

Other training I had in the past year and a half included Google Adwords, SEO, project management, social media management, copy writing, Photoshop, Saasu, etc.

Search Engine Optimization

As for the other team members, John is furthering his know-how in SEO and social media.

Joan, or Jo as we call her, is the newest in the team and she actually fits in. Most of our recruits never make it past the trial period so I’m just glad so we got a new set of reliable hands on board. Among other stuff, she is working John on the SEO campaign.

I did also train myself on SEO by reading articles and watching training videos. I still keep up to date on the latest stuff about SEO by following some blogs and SEOmoz on the social media.