Over the past two years, more than 230,000 small and medium-sized businesses have benefited from Vodafone’s business.connected programme, which provides free online training courses, mentoring, and workshops to help SMEs maximize their business opportunities online, adopt new technology, mitigate cyber-attacks, and meet with other like-minded individuals.
The initiative was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic and aims to upskill the online capabilities of 800,000 SMEs by 2025.
The programme has been particularly popular among Britain’s SoHo businesses, defined as organizations with 10 workers or fewer, which account for 9 in 10 sign-ups to the initiative.
Food and drink and technology businesses lead the way in terms of sectors taking advantage of the courses, followed by health and wellness businesses, those in the creative and media sector, and business services.
The programme has been backed by a collective of leading banking and technology companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Sage, Builder.ai, and delivered by small business support platform Enterprise Nation.
The leading regions where businesses are engaged with business.connected courses are London, South-East England, North-West England, South-West England, and West-Midlands.
Andrew Stevens, Head of UK Small and Medium Business at Vodafone, said that the initiative was launched to better support small businesses who had very little experience in using digital tools to stay connected to their customers and improve their confidence in adopting new technologies. He added that it was great to see so many businesses benefiting from the programme and that they were well on their way to meeting their commitment to help 800,000 SMEs gain digital skills.
Emma Jones, CBE, Founder of Enterprise Nation, said that increasing digital capacity is a key driver of productivity and growth and that embedding a culture of digital intelligence and data literacy is one of the ways that the small business community can thrive and compete convincingly with the rest of the world.
»Small businesses receive digital skills training«
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