The introduction of the Internet and especially e-mail has made the world a much faster place with business bearing the brunt of an ever-increasing demand for a hurried response or reply. The result of this is that businesses are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by a flood of information and communication demands.
To survive and prosper executives and business leaders now more than ever need to understand the lingo, digital tools and techniques that will save them time, increase their productivity and put them ahead of their competitors.
For this purpose USB Executive Development (USB-ED), the public training company which forms part of the University of Stellenbosch Business School, and Britefire, a training company in e-business and marketing, have joined forces for an intensive one-day workshop on efficiently managing information overload and to make effective use of social networks and digital tools to deal with it. The workshop will be led by Godfrey Parkin, a fifteen-year veteran of the European and US e-marketing industries.
The workshop is aimed at senior managers and professionals, especially those engaged in fields subject to rapid change or overwhelming information flows. It deals with new skills needed to keep a professional edge, to filter knowledge from noise and to use online social networks to short-cut knowledge acquisition and grow professional insight.
The workshop provides for specific digital tools and techniques which save time, build expertise and increase productivity. These include RSS, what it is and how to use it to save time, how to efficiently monitor competitors and new developments, how to use alerts from news feeds, blogs and discussion forums, time and mail management and online group productivity tools for managing projects, sharing documents and video conferencing.
It will provide participants with skills to save time, adopt a highly efficient regime for managing information overload, develop a clearer view of their work and professional field, be able to access the best sources of current insight into their areas of interest, select, join and use effectively the most appropriate social networks, manage, filter and harness the growing flood of information, communicate more clearly, succinctly, and timorously with others and evaluate, select and use the digital tools most appropriate to their needs.
The workshop will be held on 5 May 2009 at the USB campus in Bellville. Class times are from 08h15 to 17h30. For more information visit http://www.usb-ed.com/programmes/60/show or contact Laura Kirsten at 021 918 4467 or e-mail .
