Future trends for business skills training

Singh feels strongly the pendulum will swing away from massive and asynchronous to intimate and real-time, anyway. WizIQ is heavily pushing a new feature that allows instructors to build live online classes on the theory that this is what students most want.

Another trend he sees is people taking IT and coding courses as part of their business skills development. For example, he says, “several folks in our own organization who have nothing to do with programming as part of their career have taken such courses. The reason is that wherever there’s data, you need to learn operations on that data. Marketing folks want to take those courses, not because they want to become programmers, but because they want to do a better job at marketing.”

Llorens expects to see demand grow for people who can create and deploy online education to keep a company’s talent base growing and engaged. “You have to use every subconscious thing you can think of to make the course entertaining and engaging,” he explains. “That’s going to become ultra high value as a talent. There’s going to be somebody who’s in charge of user engagement for the class. If you’ve got folks who are really good at that, your platform will beat out the next one.”

Asked about what he thinks the long-term trends are, Visciano talks about the introduction of more working practitioners into education. “If you go to MBA programs, what you see is that the most popular teachers are teaching it from a place of experience,” he says. “It’s not somebody who’s teaching about fundamental theories. It’s somebody who has made a million mistakes and is bloodied and bruised.”

Online platforms like Udemy, he argues, have that ethic at their foundation. Classes sell if they are by “everyday experts, taking that practical knowledge, distilling it into a course and delivering it to the world. I think that is the direction things will go, both in MBA programs and in online learning — the shift toward learning from people who know it and who’ve lived it.”

Lamkin says an explosion of new projects is bringing more innovation into the marketplace, “but there’s a downside to that. You and I could put our heads together and by this afternoon have our own school online and have some courses there. It might look good, but it may not actually be very good, so there is a risk that a person will take time to take courses and find out they may not be all that good.”

So the development he’s looking for is a way to evaluate online learning programs. “If you’re that end user, you definitely want to spend that time in a quality course that’s going to benefit them on a long-term basis,” he says. “That creates a need for an informed, independent organization that takes the time to go through the materials and have an unbiased ability to evaluate that material. Those types of resources will be more and more important going forward.”

4 thoughts on “Skipping The MBA For Online Ed? How Far Has The Business Skills Category Come?

  1. hi sir
    i am Bachelor Degree in a social senses, so in need master of public police & and administration .
    dear sir help me that course with free online course and how can i get the degree ???

    1. Hello Adam,

      Unfortunately, our MPA and MPP knowledge is limited (indeed, close to zero). We do not offer degrees ourselves, but many students have used our courses to help prepare for graduate program admissions, especially to deal with prerequisite courses or to revitalize an aging degree.

      You can review our catalog of courses here and here. They come with (free) digital certificates of completion. Their value lies very much more in what you can do with them than in the value of the certificate — if that is a bit of a curse, then it is also a bit of a blessing! Maybe one or more of these courses can help you prepare for a graduate program. See, too, our frequent questions here.

  2. I have an MBA. So here’s my tuppence. Have to say that I am doubtful about some of the claims that I’ve read online. One person I chat to on Coursera, claims he’s doing an MBA online. He is an exceptional case, I’ll say why in a moment. In his case he probably is, since he’s reading the actual texts from a formal institution and completing topics which ‘about’ cover the course subjects. He agrees that 18 or so MOOC’s is really not an MBA. I am not saying it can’t be done, quite the opposite actually. You can teach yourself anything at any level. It can be done (or close approximation anyway) but requires considerable background reading imo, and as many MOOC’s as it takes, from as many platforms as is needed! Whether you can sell this ‘virtual MBAS’ to an employer – as being the same as an MBA, I am not so sure. But then comes the question, why does it have to be an MBA anyway? I’d say the Saylor ‘Business Administration’ Bachelor’s program is adequate to prove you have some Business Administration.

  3. Yes.. I agree with you.. Its absolute details.. Thanks to share this information..

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