As one of the leading CPD Accreditation organisations in the UK and globally, we continuously monitor the business and economic landscape and provide assistance to our membership community and everyone involved in continuing professional development.
At the end of January 2023 we looked at the ways in which CPD Accreditation can assist training organisations with achieving their business objectives over the year. We presented the information via a member-only webinar hosted by our Co-founder and CEO Amanda Rosewarne and in this blog post we’d like to share some of the highlights with you.
Here is a summary of what we discussed:
We want to make 2023 a big success and with the world currently facing serious amounts of economic challenges and an increasingly competitive market, so we need to be thinking about how we put CPD accreditation in the front and centre of it to become trusted advisors.
The Deloitte Report
We came across a fantastic report by Deloitte, who have really looked at what transformational value really looks like and how to talk about it in a comprehensive way. They also touched on different capabilities and processes that suit digital transformation for your own organisations and training businesses. Some questions asked included:
- What do we need to improve and how do we need to improve it
- What does effective transformational leadership look like?
- How do we extend our value?
- How do we extend our why beyond transformation?
We recommend reading through this report and understanding how to talk in the right language to our customers – https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/process-and-operations/us-sdt-think-big-business-transformation.pdf
So what’s happening out there?
The learning industry has been completely turned inside out. Pre-pandemic, it was comprised of a very clunky-looking blended learning solution, so face-to-face was very separate from online learning, sometimes merged yet all very disconnected. During the lockdowns, there was an exponential growth of online devices, and it completely transformed the concept of online learning. We began consuming information from a new world of hybrid learning. So now we need to look at where we put ourselves in all of this.
Economic Challenges
There are several economic challenges out there, including the cost of living crisis and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), so we have got to look at ways to entice businesses to invest in their people by providing them with training.
A study from the Association for Talent Development has found that companies who provide comprehensive training programmes have a 24% higher profit margin than those that don’t.
How can we take that message and talk to employers about it? We can simply plug the data within our pitches and communications with employers and clients to demonstrate there is value in training and development.
We now go back to that concept of trust and how you, within the education and training community, can become trusted advisors.
With the pandemic making the world go virtual, an unusual paradox opened up. The research found that whilst all of us use the internet, only 50% trust it. It was discovered that the older technologies are assigned a higher level of trust than the digital marketplace that we have in front of us.
Unfortunately, in the training industry we are faced with an online market that includes bogus experts, ‘pirate content’, and counterfeit qualifications. So we must differentiate through our stories and stand out from the crowd.
CPDSO Accreditation as a Trust Mark
It’s important to remember that your accreditation is a trust mark, which once taken back to the basics means it’s a signalling convention and demonstrates that something is in accordance with a set of standards.
We see that those in the market that get their marketing really sharp and become successful educational providers are those who:
- Look at their personal brand,
- Twin their brand with the CPDSO Trustmark
- Invest in marketing and sales technology
- Create an accountable marketing plan
- Become confident online
One thing we advise you to do when thinking about differentiating yourself online is look at your competitors. One of those tools we recommend looking at is called SimilarWeb. You can use this tool to look at your competitors and see where they are spending on digital advertising, and looking at where their traffic is coming through the web. You can use this data as a benchmark for your marketing plan to improve traffic to your website through SEO, social media and organic search.
ChatGPT: A New AI Resource
So if you would like to stretch beyond what we have already discussed, and think about how you can use artificial intelligence, ChatGPT is a new AI technology that has started gaining traction. It’s a type of natural language processing (NLP) technology that uses machine learning algorithms to generate human-like text based on input from a user. This is the first indication of AI being a simple tool for us.
Something important to remember about using ChatGPT is that when you ask it to create content, it creates it with a digital footprint which is recognisable by search engines. It has been made clear by search engines that they can very easily identify content that has been written by artificial intelligence, so content straight from ChatGPT cannot be used, and will lower your rankings straight away. But do use what the software has to offer, and it’s worth familiarising yourself with the tool in case it starts to become part of future discussions.
Take a look at ChatGPT here – https://chat.openai.com/
We hope you were able to take away some new tools and resources to help create a transformational year for all of us.
If you would like to watch the full webinar, take a look at the recording here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI_GzEPklKc
