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Tag: training

zapposinsights.com – monetising the lessons of success

Written by Ian Jindal on . Posted in eCommerce, Publishing.

zapposinsights.com

Well well – this is a fun idea. Zappos, a US$ 1 billion etailer that’s done for shoes what Amazon did for books, has created a ‘club’ for the “Fortune One Million” group.

The club, c$40 a month membership, is a mix of video content, happy-clappy employee indoctrination videos and general bigging-up of the company culture. It’s all very ‘can do’ (and more importantly ‘have done’).

In addition there’re knowledge base articles, interviews with key staff and execs, and opportunities to post questions.

Although a little ‘American’ at times, it’s an interesting approach from a company that clearly believes in values of staff and customer engagement, delivering great service and in sharing insights. After all, it’s one thing to be given an insight, but an entirely more difficult thing to interpret and then implement the requirements of that insight.

Having worked for years in best practice publishing, training and indeed the structured, state-supported business development sector (with Business Link for London, formerly Europe’s largest enterprise support agency) this initiative is to be welcomed.

That they’re clearly going to monetise the One Million is simply an elegant example of that commercial spirit 😉

Please let me know your experiences if you join.

E-consultancy.com’s Graduate Academy

Written by Ian Jindal on . Posted in eCommerce.

This is a great idea. It’s become axiomatic that there’s a skills-shortage in ecommerce, but a less-well documented problem with the explosion in ecommerce is the lack of entry-level, junior skills.

Such has been the growth that experienced ecommerce people are now looking at senior management paygrades, but there’s not been the investment within companies to grow the skills of young, generalist people, or those from other disciplines, to become the ecommerce practicioners of next year.

This initiative answers two problems for businesses:

  1. accredited, dependable training – you’ll have confidence that the graduates have covered the bases
  2. there’s a critical mass for recruiting (much easier than a ‘spray and pray’ approach to attracting junior staff).

What will the graduates do?

“What’s included for free on our Graduate Academy:

  • 3 day residential training placement in July at Reading University
  • 15 days of distance and online training during August
  • A further 2 days residential training at the end of August at Reading University
  • Free access to www.e-consultancy.com for the period of training
  • Guaranteed interviews with leading companies”

We’ll take a look at the progress of the Academy in more detail in InternetRetailing, but in the meantime this is a very welcome initiative and sure to be oversubscribed.

Graduate Academy | Training | E-consultancy.com