Why we created Emphasis 360™

Author : Rob Ashton

Posted : 06 / 05 / 15

Our courses are transformative. It’s the norm for participants to leave the training room full of confidence and buzzing with ideas. This is true even for people who were initially sceptical. (In fact, they often end up as our biggest advocates.)

But even the best training can only go so far. New skills stay in the memory only for so long, especially if you don’t use them. It takes effort to practise them. And under pressure from deadlines and other work, old habits may re-emerge.

What people need is regular, expert help to apply those skills.

We’ve been discussing this a lot at Emphasis over the last few weeks. But it’s proved a tough nut to crack. The challenge has been to work out how to provide dedicated help – or regular, ongoing training that embeds new skills and builds new ones – without it costing the earth or requiring you to release entire teams for training every week.

Tough, but not impossible. Because I think we’ve cracked it.

As I write this, my team are building a follow-up learning system unlike any other. In fact, it may well be unique not just in business-writing training but in the training world full stop.

We’re calling it Emphasis 360™, and it will make good writing a strong, permanent habit in the people who report to you.

It will embed the writing skills that your people learn on our in-company courses – to make them permanent – and it will teach them new ones. It will create confident business writers and develop them into highly skilled communicators. And it will do this without straining your budget or taking up hours of study time that your team simply don’t have.

‘Sounds great,’ you say, ‘but how are you going to do that?’ Read on to find out.

Weekly, interactive learning sessions

All members of Emphasis 360 will have access to a website dedicated to developing their writing skills. Every week, we’ll be uploading a fully interactive learning session to that site and emailing members to encourage them to use it. Once each lesson is uploaded it will be available on demand, so your team will be able to access it in their own time. Not that they’ll need much time, as we’re designing each so they can complete it in the space of a coffee break. That’s because we want to make sure they do complete it, and because short, regular practice is the best way to build good habits.

The sessions will feature TV-standard videos, produced in our studio by our own film-maker, Jay Bartlett. (If you’ve seen our Writing better email e-learning course, you’ll know how good these are.)

And your team will learn from doing as well as watching: the sessions will include comprehensive e-learning. As well as video, they’ll feature quizzes and interactive exercises – even audio. In other words, we’ll be covering the full range of learning styles, so that everyone can study and learn effectively. Your team will also be able to track their progress – as will you.

Global better-writing resource library

Week by week, we’ll be adding special support resources to the exclusive members’ site. The resource library will include best-practice checklists, how-to guides and great-looking templates. Over time, it will become a truly unique resource covering every aspect of written communication in the workplace – from handling complaint letters to pitching for contracts worth millions. Ultimately, we want it to include everything you could ever need to produce excellent business writing, and all in one place. We believe that this alone will be a world first.

Dedicated, priority helpdesk

Even with the best initial training and resources, your team may still stumble when trying to apply their new skills. So we want to help them with that too. As you may have noticed, we’ve been trialling a special helpdesk system recently. It works a bit like an IT helpdesk, except that it’s staffed by our writing experts (and we speak in plain English). It includes a ticketing system so that you (and we) can track your query.

With the launch of Emphasis 360, we’re adding more resource to that helpdesk, so we can give members priority access and give them more detailed help. Their queries will go straight to the front of the queue, where one of our specialist advisers will be ready to help them. Combined with our courses, this will create the most effective training we’ve ever provided.

Emphasis 360 will cost £150+vat per person for a year’s subscription. But you can gain access for your entire team at no cost. That’s because, to celebrate the launch, we’ve decided to offer membership as a free add-on to every course booked in May or June this year. That’s £1,500 of extra value on a course for ten people.

We’ve never made an offer like this before. And we won’t be making this one again. It will be available only for courses booked to run in May and June. And our trainer availability means we can only run another 22 courses in that time. (Forty per cent of dates have already been taken by regular clients.) Once we’ve used up our capacity, that will be it. So you’ll need to hurry.

We’ll be opening up registration for just two days this week, starting at 5pm today, Wednesday 6 May, and ending at 5pm British Summer Time on Friday 8 May.

Once it’s open, you’ll be able to register your interest in company courses. We’ll then call you on a first come, first served basis to secure dates for your course and access to Emphasis 360 for your team. (If you only have two or three people to train, or the course is for you, don’t worry. You can also book places on one of our courses for individuals and we’ll add Emphasis 360 membership for you.)

Remember, we’re designing this to fix your team’s writing problems permanently, so that they can reach their potential – and you can get on with your job.

Don’t miss your chance to get a year’s training for your team for the price of a day’s course.

Registration closed on 8 May, but you can still gain access.

Image credit: “laptop and stethoscope” by jfcherry, used under CC BY-SA 2.0