Freelancers in all sectors need more and more digital training to increase their sales

Despite the fact that the pandemic has accelerated the digitization process among the self-employed and smaller companies, the truth is that the majority of SMEs and self-employed workers continue to have severe deficiencies in digital matters. So much so that almost 600,000 small businesses still do not even have a computer to work or more than two million activities do not have a website, according to the report The Digitization of SMEs 2021, prepared by the National Observatory of Technology and Society (ONTSI).

However, we must not forget that having digital tools, and having a computer and a website is not synonymous with being digitized. Today, experts warn that having a website or social networks is not enough to face the competition and attract customers online. Like any other tool, the network and its technologies have to be learned to use properly.

More and more freelancers and entrepreneurs from all sectors -not just digital ones- need to be trained in digitization to survive. AICAD Business School is one of the most prestigious business schools in the world, specializing in talent and digital skills. For years, the school has focused on supporting the self-employed and micro-entrepreneurs through thousands of free courses in their digital transformation process. Through its different courses, the school provides digital training in the necessary skills that the self-employed worker currently requires to be able to compete with better business intelligence in a very difficult environment.

Hermel Balcázar, general director of AICAD, explains in an interview with this newspaper why training in digital skills is more necessary today than ever and what application self-employed workers, entrepreneurs and small businessmen can give it to gain visibility and, ultimately, increase their sales.

The importance of digital training for freelancers and small businesses

We start from the fact that the self-employed are a group different from all the others, they endure many hours of work, sometimes forgetting even about the family. Self-employed workers have much more fragile businesses than any other corporation, where they have large investors and large financial credits and many other things that the self-employed do not have. In fact, large companies make their annual budget in advance, a luxury that the self-employed can rarely afford because he lives from day to day.

To understand the importance of training in a true digital culture, one only has to imagine that in the year 2040 more than 90% of the economy will be digital. For a freelancer, who is young and who has to run his business for the next few years, doing it in an analog way, without knowledge and without digital skills, is literally unfeasible. When we go to eat we don't search anywhere other than on mobile, and we go to the closest site, which has better reviews or is better positioned. Look for a freelancer who has a restaurant how important it can be for him to understand that he has to compete, not globally, but also locally.

For this reason, right now there are two fundamental challenges for the self-employed: the first is that they ask themselves how I can position myself and be different from the competition so that they can find me online. The second is that the self-employed person understands that this is a decisive strategy for his business, because today we hardly use any other tool to search for a service or product. We even buy the house online.

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What will happen to that self-employed person who does not go digital or who has not reflected on the importance of doing so? Well, it will disappear. It is mathematical, there is no other alternative: either you digitize or you disappear. A true culture of digitization is needed that starts from education and that allows everyone, and especially entrepreneurs, to understand for the first time that the DNA of success today has to do with understanding the digital culture itself. Above all, generate the mentality that businesses require right now. And that is done through training. Right now, freelancers in all sectors need more digital training to increase their sales.

There are many things that digitization can do right now for freelancers and smaller businesses, especially since it is not expensive to digitize a business. The self-employed person has to understand that, currently, going digital, although sometimes we understand that it means setting up a website so that people can see you online, or selling a product online, is much broader than that. The latter is only the superficial part of the whole process. Digitization has to do with affecting the thinking about the business strategy that the self-employed person must have.

Right now there are no more accelerated formulas for creating business than digital ones. Before it was radio advertising, television, but now it is the internet. And, of course, the website is important, but the self-employed person has to understand that this is only a small part of the entire digital strategy that he should have. It is 1% of what he has to do with positioning and creating a brand online. We live in the culture of digital content, the internet is content and if you don't have content that catches the customer, the page won't work. It is essential to educate yourself to know how to make good content that catches, that is clear and that is useful.

At this stage, in which so much is said about digital transformation, we must understand that it is necessary to attack with adequate training to achieve a true transformation of the person's culture. A lawyer who has a web page, but then does not have a forum, does not have a blog and does not have a site where he generates conversations and helps people, will surely have another page. But if this freelancer begins to give valuable content and testimonials of the things he does helping people, the reputation rises rapidly. It is a principle of solidarity, that is how social relations work.

There is a lot of information on the internet and many services are offered. And it sometimes happens that a company can contract the services of a person who offers himself and then does not know how to do what he offers. Training in digital skills is also that, it helps prevent to distinguish those people who are not the right ones to work in your business and to help you in your growth as an entrepreneur.

There are several digital skills that the European Union is promoting right now for the training of SMEs, because they are the furthest behind in this digitization process. Within this European project, these 21 digital skills are based on giving the person enough culture to differentiate and understand the essential keys to be able to work. When you already know something you will be able to better differentiate or filter the people who can help you in your business.

So these courses that we give at AICAD, which we also give for free for the self-employed and SMEs, start on the one hand from experience, but on the other hand they also serve to provide reflection. It is not only about giving technical knowledge, which of course is fundamental to knowing how to do it, but also philosophy, knowing how to think about things in order to do them well. It's about having enough background to not make too many mistakes.

AICAD has always thought from the perspective of small SMEs. Actually, you don't need an engineering degree to know how to understand and manage a digital business in an ideal way. They are small courses, between one and fifteen hours in these phases, for freelancers who sometimes do not have time to do 2,000 hours of training.

In this type of program, the language is adapted to the person who is working on a day-to-day basis in the small business. We give quality training, but also brief so that they understand and execute correctly from the small, not from the big.

We have been developing content and offering courses aimed at freelancers and entrepreneurs for more than 15 years. Within the area of ​​education and technology for more than 25 years. Years do not always give experience, but in our case we have been adding, creating an innovation laboratory to learn day by day and take the most optimal knowledge to transform the economy of the self-employed in a simple way and without costing them a lot of money.

This has allowed us to work, on the one hand, on knowledge, on the criteria to develop training that adapts to the needs of an increasingly complex market. And, on the other hand, in the backend, as a technology company that develops all the layers of training, of knowledge... Everything that a small business needs, we have tested thousands of times: make a web page, make a landing page, make a sales funnel, develop content that really impacts.

All these years testing, we transfer them to the self-employed for free through training courses and scholarships.