Making Capital Out of the Small Business Skills and Training Boost

"How do I strengthen my team's position in the market?"
According to Inside Small Business, this and inflation are just some of the concerns of small business owners and leaders today.

Thankfully, there is cloud, project management and cyber security training for small businesses to support in protecting from cyber threats, scaling service delivery and keeping projects on track. Small to medium businesses (SMBs) can also apply for small business grants for training from the Federal Government.

Small Business Skills Training Needs

On top of worries about escalating costs and inflation rates, small business owners and their teams need to deal with increased competition and growing cyber threats.

Regional SMB owner Bronwyn Reid writes about how to avoid being a commodity and strengthen your value proposition. If potential buyers view your products or services as interchangeable commodities, the perception of you and your team becomes similar. You will find yourself competing based on price instead of the value you can bring. To avoid this, she suggests differentiating your offering by:

• ensuring that your team are skilled, qualified and certified

• maximising special tools and equipment

• employing innovative processes

• providing better quality products and efficient service delivery

• offering a guarantee
  

And with the recent data privacy breaches, many ask about what is required of small businesses to protect customer and team data.

Strengthen Your Value Proposition with Small Business Training

Business management platform MYOB surveyed 1,500 Australian small to medium businesses (SMBs) in 2022. Fifty-nine per cent of these SMBs say they are currently experiencing poor digitisation. Poor digitisation is when business and people management software apps and tools run in silos instead of seamlessly integrating.

Collectively, Australia's small and medium-sized businesses invest $2.2 billion (about $10.79 per team member) each year on digital solutions to help improve business operations.

Making effective use of this investment means equipping your team with the right skills. Lumify Work has researched and developed courses tailored to help SMBs better handle the technological challenges they face. We designed our small business ICT training to provide businesses and their staff with the skills and knowledge needed to manage technology effectively in an SMB environment.

Our courses currently cover topics such as cloud, cyber security, and project management. But more courses are underway; we are rapidly developing them based on the needs of SMBs and growing technological change.

We listened to leaner organisations about their pain points -- many hats, little time for training and long task lists. We then tailored and curated our courses to address these concerns. Our courses are shorter and more flexible, so busy professionals can fit them into their schedules.

Boost Your Budget with Small Business Grants for Employee Training

You can mitigate challenges with rising costs when you request training grants for small businesses. The Small Business Technology Investment Boost and Small Business Skills and Training Boost by the Federal Government offer small business grants for employee training to make up for your expenses.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) explains that small businesses can deduct an added 20 per cent of the cost incurred on business expenses and depreciating assets that support their digital adoption. Examples of costs supporting digital adoption include portable payment devices, cyber security systems or subscriptions to cloud-based services.

For the new Small Business Skills and Training Boost, an annual $100,000 cap on expenditure will apply to each qualifying income year.

• Small businesses can find support under existing laws for related training and upgrades beyond these.

• Small businesses can keep deducting expenditures ineligible for the bonus deduction under the existing tax law.
  

Businesses can also continue to deduct expenditures over the $100,000 cap under existing law.

This measure applies to business expenses incurred in the period beginning from 7:30 pm AEDT 29 March 2022 until 30 June 2023.

Level Up with Small Business Training Courses

Maximising the technologies you have invested in and helping your team gain and maintain their credentials and qualifications allows you to stand out from the competition and establish the value you offer. It also helps with building team morale.

Lumify Work's Head of Sales, Kevin Lowndes, shares:

Building a dedicated Small Business market offering is an important step in addressing the skills challenges for such an important community in Australia. We sought advice and insights from many customers and partners to solve the gap between self-paced learning and intensive short courses delivered in person. I’m delighted we are able to launch an SMB offering in cloud, cyber security and project management which addresses the challenges of Small Businesses, to develop the appropriate skills in an affordable way which reduces the impact of time away from the tools. This is the start of a dedicated SMB offering and we have an exciting roadmap to expand into categories which resonate across SMB in Australia.

You can access flexible training options for your small business, like self-paced courses and drop-in virtual consultations with our Lumify Work technical instructors. Our small business training offers are available across Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Canberra. Feel free to contact us about our customised training solutions for small businesses.

Download our eBook on grants for small businesses and training options.