Building your skills
At Outset, we try and approach skills development in two key ways: firstly, helping you to figure out what skills you already have and how you can use these to the best of your ability, and secondly, helping you to develop new skills that will help make your business a success.
Often, people have more skills than they realise, perhaps from a former job, or a passion or hobby that you’ve honed over the years. In some cases it’s a natural skill – like the “gift of the gab” – that has the potential to make “selling” your new product or service that much easier if harnessed correctly and used to your advantage.
The first stage of our online-learning programme, Outset Online is all about helping you to identify and understand your transferrable skills, strengths and weaknesses so that you’re ready to move forward. This stage is also focused on developing your research skills – an invaluable skill when it comes to defining your market, product or service, competitors and customers – and we also offers tools and exercises for helping you to refine your personal skills like stress management and decision making.
Then, in the second stage of Outset Online, there’s a greater focus on developing your core business skills. Some of these might come easier to you than others, depending on the experiences you’ve had. You might be already be a great social media user, which will make some of the sections on marketing, social media and promoting your business much easier. Equally, it might be the numbers and financial parts of running a business that come more naturally to you. Either way, you can work through the programme, at your own pace, focusing on developing the skills that you need to make your business a success.