LearnKey Blog

Certification Journey: Moving along slowly

I saw that our Word 2010 course was only three sessions long, and I thought to myself, “This is going to be easy, and I will be ready to take my certification test in no time!” Well, procrastination is one thing I am very good at, so it has taken me longer to get started than I thought it would.

Finally last night after a long day at work, I made myself open up the training and get started (this was due in large part to the fact that there was nothing decent on TV).

In our training, we have this great feature: the Pretest. This kind of acts like a gauge to let you know how much knowledge you already have about the information in the course, and what areas you will need to focus on. I looked at the pretest and thought to myself, “Not a problem. I am going to ace this test in about 10 minutes and then I can back to reading my book.” My reasoning behind this thought was that I have been using Word since my high school days, and now I use Word pretty much every single day at work. Well, I had another thing coming to me. I went through the test in about 15 minutes, but as I did, the realization slowly crept in on me that I had no clue. There were a lot of terms I did not know and a lot of features I was clueless about. At the end of the pretest, when the results said I failed, I was pretty disappointed in myself and a little nervous about the challenge I was taking on.

The good thing is, I realized I have a long way to go to learn everything there is to know about Word, which worked as a motivator. So with this in mind, I started looking through the resources section of our training and looked at the glossary to find the definitions of many of the terms I had missed on the pretest. My lack of knowledge also made me think that this is something I really need to do so that I can function more efficiently in Word at work. So I am making the commitment to continue to make progress on this journey every week. I’ll keep you posted on my progress! If you are currently on your own certification journey, let us know how it is going for you, and any achievements or set backs you have faced trying to get certified.

Student Certification Success with LearnKey in eSchool News

Not long after receiving two Eddie Awards for our training courses, LearnKey’s role in helping 26 students from University Senior High School achieve their Microsoft Office Specialist credential was featured in an article on eSchool News.

“Giving our students the opportunity to meet certification requirements provides them with an extra boost in their career pathway,” says USHS Principal Eric Davidson. “It also gives these students an opportunity to apply their skills in unique and innovative ways that set them apart from their peers. We’re very excited about our students’ accomplishment and look forward to continuing this certification program next year.”

Head on over to the eSchool News website to read the full article about how our Microsoft Office interactive learning library helped set these students apart from their peers on resumes and college applications.