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Kristy Bennett’s courses on marketing (including yourself)

Kristy Bennett is well known in OSS circles in Australia as a creative soul, as well as a serial (and concurrent) entrepreneur. Among many other things, she runs MIB Business Solutions providing a range of management and marketing services. This is usually done in-house, but every once in a while she offers public training days. The next upcoming ones are in Melbourne, in the evening of September 30th, and October 1st. A rare opportunity!

The evening session is Selling Yourself: Presenting with Confidence.

Whether you are looking for a new client, business partner, interviewing potential staff or seeking a new employer the art of ‘selling yourself’, either as an individual or as a representation of your business, product or service, is critical to finding what you are seeking. Moving away from typical topics of marketing channels, sales and branding, what to wear and even writing and reviewing applications this session is solely focused on you and how your sell yourself into a role.

With a very practical, hands on approach you will be working through finding the words to say, the manner to say them and they physical aspects of meeting with your potential ‘purchaser’. This workshop is geared for people with an technology and like professional background and will look specific at presentation manner.

The next day has two independent parts (that can be booked together also):
Quick Start Marketing: Starting your Marketing from Scratch and Leaving with a Strategic Plan
and
Getting Linked In: How to find your Marketing Match

Many people are weary of business/marketing training, but with the right person teaching it’s very valuable stuff. Take a peek. It’s pretty cheap already, and there’s an earlybird discount for bookings before September 12th, and you also get some additional goodies including a good book and a bottle of organic wine 😉

Note: Open Query is providing the logistics for Kristy, similar to us organising Sebastian Bergmann teaching his “Quality Assurance in PHP Projects” workshop. Is Open Query going in a different direction with these new things? I don’t think so, in fact I reckon it makes perfect sense: OSS has a strong but generally neglected business and marketing component.
For code, there’s the great OSS community. For your business, there’s OSIA but it’s also good to get some clueful professional insights through training. I don’t partner with just anybody, in fact I’m very picky. Training should not just be by a competent trainer with reasonable materials, it should be done by an expert in the field. In my opinion, the trainer is what makes training valuable. If you ask a tangential question during a course, you’ll want to expect a competent answer rather than “euh”, right? That’s what I’m talking about.

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