Category: Insights
LearnKey First Quarter rollout of enhanced courses and products for 2012!
It is starting to be really busy with our LearnKey 2012 production shoot schedule, and I’m very excited with some of our new courses and exams recently released the past three weeks. It started with our February 2012 release of our Advanced Security Practitioner Certification (CASP) course designed to provide students with an explanation and understanding of conceptualization of security topics, as well as theoretical instruction/demonstrations in designing and engineering security solutions. This training course prepares students for the CompTIA exam CAS-001. LearnKey Expert course instructor Tom Carpenter does a very thorough and solid job covering the key objectives.
Earlier this week we successfully released our Flash CS5 MasterExam™ that helps IT certification candidates put the finishing touches on their comprehension and confidence as a final step before sitting for the exam. With over 200 questions, this supplements the training and hands-on experience needed to pass the Adobe® Certified Associate (ACA) Rich Media Communication with Adobe® Flash® certification exam.
Another release this week is our PowerPoint 2010 MasterExam 77-883 which is a great way to assess the skills of your staff with the individual components of PowerPoint 2010. Increase productivity by discovering and correcting skill deficiencies, or to find out how proficient prospective employees are before you hire them.
We ended the week releasing our Dreamweaver CS5 MasterExam™ with over 200 questions that supplements the training and hands-on experience needed to pass the Adobe® Certified Associate (ACA) Web Communication with Adobe® Dreamweaver® certification exam.
Over the next couple of weeks I will share with you our 2012 Production release schedule for the remainder of the year. One teaser I can share with you is a very exciting course we plan to release about leveraging behavior – a perfect life skills and career readiness topic.
We are off to a great start, and I promise to keep you posted on our most recent product releases!
Tech jobs are the most popular among veterans
A recent article by PayScale recognizes the difficult task of returning to civilian employment after military service, and in an effort to ease the confusion, asked the question, “Where do military veterans usually work after finishing their service?”
The result? Veterans typically go to jobs where they can apply the skills they learned in the military, which turn out to be mainly tech jobs. PayScale measured the top fifteen most common, well paid, and quickly growing professions veterans choose, and also the top ten job skills veterans report having, and found that while some of the jobs were leadership and medical positions, many of the jobs and skills had one thing in common – they were mostly in information technology or other tech-related fields.
Here is a sample of the data – the top five job skills veterans report having:
- Emergency Room (ER)
- Computer Security
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Electronic Troubleshooting
- Security Risk Management
Read the full article for more information, including the full list of top job skills, and the titles, average salaries, and projected job growth of each of the top fifteen job roles.
LearnKey, now a Better Learning Systems company
Good news, everyone! It was just announced that LearnKey is now a Better Learning Systems company.
What does this mean for you? As a parent company, Better Learning Systems oversees three brands – LearnKey, LearnCast, and Predix. Each company will continue to operate with their current branding, but the new partnership allows us to expand each others’ offerings in a way we could have never done before. LearnKey customers now have access to LearnCast’s mobile learning and publishing platform, and the Know Your Talents™ behavioral learning system powered by Predix.
Continue reading “LearnKey, now a Better Learning Systems company”
What’s Your New Year’s Resolution?
At the beginning of every year, people from all over the world make a vow to improve their lives. Sure, you can say things like “I’m losing weight!” or “I’m going to exercise more!” like millions of others, but unfortunately most people don’t stick with it. So, with typical New Year’s Resolution failure rates extremely high, why not try something new this year – get a certification or gain a new job skill.
As several studies in the past few years have concluded, employers claim they can’t find enough qualified people to fill the available jobs. If there is a lack of qualified job candidates, that means the qualified ones will stand out even more than before. That means that if you’re qualified, your chance at landing the job you’re after just skyrocketed.
See for yourself – take a look at the job results when you search for “A+ Certification”.
Want to learn Adobe Photoshop? Here are some jobs requiring Photoshop skills.
Mobile apps are huge right now – and they all need skilled developers to create them. Here are some Mobile App Developer jobs.
I’m not going to lie, mastering a new skill and gaining a certification takes dedication and focus. It’s not something you can set aside an hour every few weeks to work on, you really have to work at it. The same rule applies to pretty much anything that will improve your life, though. Want to lose weight? You’re going to have to put some serious time in at the gym and watch what you eat. Working out for a few minutes once every two months won’t cut it.
So if you really want to work on adding new skills to your résumé, why not get started now? Who knows, maybe once you land that new job, you’ll get more free time to focus on some of your previous resolutions!
21st Century Tools Put Students in Charge of Their Learning
As most educators now know, using technology can increase student engagement in your classroom – but how can utilizing these tools in your classroom put students in charge of their learning? There are so many free tools available over the Internet that can be utilized in the classroom to empower students, and selecting the right tools will be dependent upon what tools your students are interested in, and what your goals are for particular lessons.
The great thing about using online tools is that everybody’s voice is the same volume, which creates the feeling that all ideas are equal. This can inspire students to share openly. Students may be more active in online forums because they feel more comfortable using them. They might make some students to share and actively participate in discussions that they may not take part in if it were an in-person discussion. These tools are the tools that students use outside of the classroom, so why not find a way to use those same tools in teaching?
Blogs and wikis are both great tools you can use to empower students. These tools are great because they are collaborative and students get the chance to have their voice heard. In one of my classes we use both blogs and wikis. We have small groups, and each one of the group members had to create our own blog. Each week we have a big idea question we have to write about on our blog, then we visit each one of our group members blogs and comment on what they posted. Our class wiki is created with the idea that students will reference the resource throughout the course. To build the wiki each student is responsible for finding five resources on a particular subject and citing the resource as well as summarizing information from the resource. Both tools have proved to be very beneficial from a learner’s perspective.
Salt Lake City Trip
I recently had the opportunity to travel up to our Salt Lake City offices to see the production studio. I had heard stories about how impressive our blue screen was, but really I had no idea just how big it really was. I have heard that our production studio has the largest blue screen in the Salt Lake Valley, and I can see why. I was only there for a short time, but it is quite the experience in our studio and I actually got to do a little bit of filming.
It is a full studio with all of the cameras lights and expected equipment. The Salt Lake Production team was great and made me feel very comfortable. The filming went smoothly and was a lot of fun, hopefully it turns out okay and they don’t have to do too much editing. You will have to stay tuned to see which course I am making a cameo in!
LearnKey Holiday Hours
Good news, everyone! It’s late December, which means it’s the time of year filled with food, family, holiday cheer, and odd business hours.
LearnKey’s Holiday Business Hours
While you can still access your OnlineExpert courses over the holidays, our sales and support staff will not be available outside of these times:
Normal business hours:
Sales: Mon – Fri 8am – 5pm MT
Support: Mon – Fri 6am – 6pm MT
Friday, December 23: Closed at 2pm MT
Monday, December 26: Closed
Friday, December 30: Closed at 1pm MT
Monday, January 2: Closed
We hope everyone has a great end of the year. Be sure to eat plenty of holiday snacks and drink plenty of eggnog, because pretty soon everyone will have to start their New Year’s resolutions to go on a diet!
LK Designer by Day…Illustrator by Night
I joined the Design Team at Learnkey in 2009, and in doing so, I like to feel that I brought a new and unique approach the team. You see, although I work as a Designer that would be a secondary definition to my artistic strengths. I am primarily an Illustrator, and even more specifically a Comic-book Illustrator.
Comic books, graphic novels, comic strips, and the like are some of the best ways to tell a story in my opinion. Comics go beyond words on a page, and in some respects go beyond some of the limitations of film-making. It is a unique and treasured storytelling medium to me and to many others! I have illustrated many small comic books as personal projects, and have been commissioned to do illustrations for clients. You can check out samples of those works here at my personal website.
Veteran Certification on Veterans Day
Showing support at the 2011 St. George Veteran’s Day Parade
LearnKey has been working with the VA VR&E (Vocational Rehab and Employment) program for the last year. The VR&E program is specifically for those veterans who have partial service related disability and the goal is to help the veteran find suitable employment and careers. We offer a number of courses and bundled program packages for the veterans which range from Web design, Graphic design, Cisco Pro, Video production, SharePoint, Office 2010, QuickBooks, CompTIA, Project Management, Database design, Windows Server, etc. We even help the veterans to find jobs with employers where they will truly fit in with the company culture.
I wanted you to know that just yesterday, we had one of the veterans we work with certify in CPEH (Certified Professional Ethical Hacker)! Chris L. has been studying using his LearnKey program that was provided by the VR&E program at the VA. He has been working hard and that work is certainly paying off. He is the first veteran in our program to attempt the CPEH and he will soon take the CPTE (Certified Pen. Testing Engineer) exam. Great job and good timing Chris, you managed to get that certification just in time for Veterans Day!
Word 2010 Certification Journey Continues
So I am still working toward my certification and have found time to finish up with session 1 of our Word 2010 training. I took the post test for session 1, and apparently I need a review. I didn’t do so well on it, but the great thing is that you get to print out a study guide that shows you the questions that you missed, and you can see what sections the questions are in so that you can go back to those spots and review the material.
After I picked my ego up off the floor, I started watching the training for session 2. The topics covered in this session are: Working with Templates, Formatting Text, Formatting Paragraphs, Organizing Data, Bulleted and Numbered Lists, Manipulating Page Layout, Manipulating Page Backgrounds, and Headers and Footers. I found a lot of information in this session very helpful, but one feature stuck out to me and alone is worth upgrading to Office 2010; it is called Autotext and it lets you save text you use regularly under the Quickparts section, then when you need it you can just insert it into any Word document. This is a great time saver, and when I am writing press releases this would be so nice to have for the About Us section.
Again, this session provides you with material that will be on the certification exam, but also gives you some great shortcuts that you can start using right away.