DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

I've heard Brad Sugars, founder of ActionCoach business coaching say that you need to put in 10,000 hours to become an expert in a subject. I reckon I must have put in that in for online PR and marketing if you count taking formal learning and continuing to learn by applying it.

My CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations) CPD Excellence log shows I've clocked up an average of 250 training hours a year, mainly on online PR and marketing. I've done that each year for the last 4 years. That's currently 1,000 hours of formal training logged, not counting at least 10 times more time refining that training through practice.

That's around an hour a working day on training. And that's not counting all the online PR and marketing tips I pick up while I'm working. Plus Twitter throws up all links and time chasing them is not logged. Nor is watching the world's top experts on TED.com, although it's fair to say that's not so focused on online PR and marketing, but it is useful information as I tend to stay within client industries.

Planning your training for each year in accordance with your training goals keeps the training focused and logging that training puts good statistics behind you.

I find that gives me confidence in negotiations: you are not just buying our time, You are buying into a whole structured development process that feeds into our business processes and service delivery.

But something as basic (and, let's face it, a tad tedious) as planning and logging time on training is something that many small company owners and freelancers put off doing. Large companies have structured training and development, with goals set and training recorded, but in my experience, their employees often put in less training hours than small business owners that have to stay on top of a wide variety of key business areas, on top of developments in their industry sector.

Would your business do better if you focused your training, and used it as added plus point for your business?

Labels: ActionCoach, Brad Sugars, online PR, online PR and marketing, training