New Media Training Courses and Communications Skills in Demand, Despite Weak Economy

Originally uploaded by js wright

New media training courses and communications skills not surprisingly are still in high demand, according to MediaBistro.com founder and cyber hostess Laurel Touby.

I interviewed Laurel for On the Record…Online, and she said that of all the categories of training courses MediaBistro.com offers – which include journalism, freelancing, editing, career development, selling your work, book publishing and more – new media training course are among the best attended, because people realize they need new media and social media communications skills to get jobs and survive amidst layoffs. You can check out MediaBistro’s training courses here.

For the last three years, I’ve been traveling all over teaching my New Media PR Boot Camp for PRSA, UCLA, the Government of Singapore and many private sector companies and NGOs, and while other training course categories are suffering, there still seems to be a real desire in the workplace to attain new media communications skills. In fact, I recently introduced an Advanced New Media Workshop to help more experienced users raise their social media communications skills to the next level.

Laurel, who founded and sold MediaBistro.com to Jupitermedia Corporation [NASDAQ: JUPM] for $23 million in July 2007, said it was the job listing that first made her community profitable. But is was the 2001 recession that created the right market conditions for her to add training courses, because in a down market, people spend more time on job hunting and professional development.

If you have a chance to listen to the interview, I’d love to hear your feedback, questions or comments. And let me know who else you’d like to hear in the future.

I recorded an exclusive one-on-one interview with DailyCandy.com founder Dany Levy last Friday, which I’ll be releasing shortly. And I’ll be talking to New York Times style reporter Allen Salkin on Monday. Here’s the RSS feed if you want to subscribe.

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