Online training available to small businesses

Small businesses will be able to register for 12 FREE interactive courses to celebrate the partnership of Microsoft''s bCentral.co.uk and iLearn.To, a leading UK hosted e-Learning solutions provider. The partnership will provide reliable and cost effective training solutions to small businesses.

A dedicated site, accessed via http://www.bcentral.co.uk, shows how e-Learning can help small businesses increase productivity and give them a choice of over 850 interactive courses from leading providers including BBC for Business, Harvard Business School, McGraw Hill and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The 12 FREE interactive courses will enable visitors to experience e-Learning first hand while giving them skills they can put into practice immediately. The FREE courses cover Microsoft desktop applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint as well as the new Windows XP. Also included are business and management courses covering topics that are familiar to all small businesses, such as Finance, Health & Safety and Stress Management.

Small businesses realise that training staff is now a necessity in an ever-changing marketplace and it is now even more important to build a competitive work force and quickly fill skills gaps, said Sieng Van Tran, iLearn.To CEO. e-Learning helps them to achieve this at a much lower cost than traditional classroom based training, while minimising the opportunity cost of losing a valuable member of staff while they are attending a course.

Our partnership will help small businesses get the most out of the software used in their organisation and thus delivering real business benefits.

In addition, we can help small businesses to respond to skills shortages and skills gaps in their workforce and increase business performance by raising the skills of the workforce.

Comments Kevin Hewitt, site editor for bCentral.co.uk: We''re trying to help our customers do more with less. One way we''re doing this is with the right service partners. We''re working hard to identify, evaluate and recruit relevant, compelling and low cost providers of web-based services for our small business customers. iLearn.To offers a fantastic solution to a business''s training requirements - they allow the owner of a business to maintain complete control whilst empowering their employees to tailor training programs to maximise their use of technology.

www.bcentral.co.uk