New venture for Wiltshire public speaking and presentation trainer

Leading public speaking and presentation company, Open Dawes Training, is launching a new service to enable people to learn at their own pace with online, on-demand training.

Until now, Open Dawes Training Ltd, based in Swindon, has focused on delivering ‘live’ training, to groups or individuals. This was usually in person, other than for overseas students, but when Coronavirus hit, online training became the main vehicle for delivery, carried out via video link.

Now Open Dawes Training’s Managing Director, Chris Dawes, is taking this one step further and creating a series of teaching video modules, assignments, quizzes, surveys, workshops and webinars, all delivered through a student dashboard, which manages progress and can even issue relevant certificates when training is completed. The training can be streamed and completed at any time.

Open Dawes Training’s existing training courses, delivered live or via video conference, will continue, and indeed become an additional element of the higher level online training packages.

“Since the pandemic, most of our training has gone online, delivered via video conferencing technology, and ironically has even included training on using video technology for presentations, meetings, and training. It’s been highly successful and – although we do still have some face-to-face training, in safe environments – our clients have been very happy to learn remotely,” said Chris.

“We always planned at some stage to offer on-demand online training, but the success of our remote training has really accelerated this plan. We expect the new suite of online on-demand presentation and public speaking training products to be ready before the end of the year and are already registering a lot of interest.

“The advantage is that candidates will have access to our training, but with the flexibility to complete courses in their own time and time zones.”

As with Open Dawes’ current training, the aim is to have the online courses CPD accredited. Open Dawes Training programmes have been CPD accredited for three years and Chris himself has delivered online training to fellow CPD accredited professionals, on behalf of the CPD Standards Office.

There will also be individual, bitesize training modules focusing on key areas that Open Dawes Training’s clients regularly want help with, such as being effective in meetings, coping with nerves, preparing a presentation, or communicating at trade shows. The products will be available as one-off purchases or on a subscription basis.

The training modules – all delivered via the Thinkific platform - will also lead to Open Dawes Training expanding into new areas, such as sales training and crisis communications.

Chris said: “We’re very excited about this new venture for Open Dawes Training, which we think will be really valuable to individuals and organisations, as well as enable us to work with a larger number of people. We’re passionate about helping people with their public speaking and presentation, because we know from our own experience what a difference it can make. As we always say, these are soft skills that give your core skills a voice, and they can open doors you may not even know exist yet!”

To register interest in the new on-demand training, visit https://opendawestraining.thinkific.com/.

Open Dawes Training runs CPD accredited public speaking and presentation training in groups and for individuals. These are delivered online but can also be delivered selectively, inhouse or at the company’s head office training centre in Swindon.

The company is one of an elite group of small businesses in the Small Business Sunday network run by Dragons’ Den star, Theo Paphitis. For more information visit www.opendawestraining.co.uk, call 01793 238259 or email [email protected].