Category: Testimonials
The Value of Certification: Improving Employability, Credibility, and Career Opportunities
Certifications are more than just credentials; they’re powerful tools that can enhance your professional credibility, open new career opportunities, and showcase your expertise in a specific field. Certifications can bolster your professional credibility significantly, whether you are in the beginning stages of your career or a seasoned professional.
1. Validating Expertise:
Certifications validate one’s skills and abilities in a particular area. Anyone can claim they have experience or the know-how to complete tasks. Still, an industry certification proves proficiency as individuals must demonstrate their ability to obtain a certification.
2. Increased Job Opportunities:
In today’s competitive job market, listing certifications on your resume can draw an employer’s eye, help you stand above applicants, and increase your chances of landing an interview.
3. Career Advancement:
Certification can be a stepping stone to career advancement as it shows high commitment, experience, and relevant development in your field, as many certifications require one to stay up-to-date with changing software developments and trends.
4. Building Credibility and Trust:
Certification enhances your professional credibility with clients, employers, and colleagues. It also assures your capabilities and commitment to continuous learning and development.
5. Personal Growth
Lastly, certification is a significant accomplishment, fostering personal pride and a sense of achievement. It can help to boost your confidence in completing tasks and validate the work and dedication you have put into your profession.
In summary, certifications are not just a piece of paper but a validation of your expertise. Investing in certifications can unlock a world of opportunities for personal and professional growth. It enhances your employability, opens doors to career advancement, builds your credibility, and fosters a feeling of achievement.
Embracing Change and Trusting Yourself to Thrive
As our work environment changes, we must learn to adapt and evolve to learn new skills and support the organizations we work for. It is difficult, and I experienced this firsthand over the past year.
With a drastic change in our business, I had to learn new skills, take on a new role, and train others on my skills. It’s easy to feel discouraged or overwhelmed. But let me tell you, resilience doesn’t mean you are immune to these emotions; it’s about finding the strength within to adapt and forge ahead. It’s about being able to bounce back from situations that are tough and learning to grow from them. Remember, change can often lead to exciting opportunities and personal growth. In this case, it happened to me.
I have learned now more than ever how to communicate with other team members and my direct supervisor to ensure that our goals are aligned. With the help of my supervisor, I learned not to be afraid to voice my own opinions and ideas. She taught me that my concerns and ideas are valuable and that expressing them confidently will help me not only find my place in this new team but also help with my self-trust and growth.
I embraced change and remained adaptable during a period of rapid transformation. This allowed me to explore new opportunities and acquire valuable skills. Although the journey was initially intimidating, I learned to navigate unfamiliar territory by being open to shifting directions. As a result, I experienced self-growth even in uncomfortable circumstances.
So, if you are going through a big change, take a moment, breathe, and believe in yourself. Each experience, be it positive or challenging, has helped you get to where you are now.
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LearnKey’s newest Key Contributor Award Winner: Did you know?
One of the biggest challenges each quarter for our leadership team is to select a team or team member to be our Key Contributor Award winner(s). That is the most wonderful problem to have as this award is about going above and beyond “what was expected of you.” We had so many fantastic nominations this past month that it really made the decision-making process tough. Which just shows we have such a great culture; everyone is always working harder to be better. Or as we say “Improving Employability Every Day.”
Speaking of employability, please join me in congratulating Jeff Martin as our newest Key Contributor Award winner and a key member of our employability team. What we learned about Jeff’s accomplishments was simply amazing. His leader, Beth Ciaramello, did a real fun “Did you know” on his nomination.
Did you know?
Jeff has contacted over one thousand (1000) students in the last 1.5 years. He has taken on additional roles (i.e. student services, workforce readiness coach) with a complete “can do” attitude. He has reviewed four hundred (400)+ resumes in 2020, has successfully placed over twenty five (25) students YTD, on-boarded a new team member, and constantly receives exceptional ratings from students on how good it is to work with him. Additionally, he fully owned the Employability Team’s assembly of our standard operating procedures.
The best part was to see and hear the feedback from everyone in the company supporting and applauding his selection. He works incredibly hard and he impacts all students’ lives and makes LearnKey an incredible place to work.
Strange times, I was able to finally congratulate him in person in a parking lot, North Scottsdale, so we could get a picture of him holding the award. Thank you for all you do Jeff Martin and the entire LearnKey family. We continue to strive to get better and improve employability every day.
Jeff
#LKEVOLUTION
Students to LearnKey: In Susan we trust
Our quarterly award (Key Contributor) is something we are very proud of at LearnKey. This person or team is recognized for exceeding expectations and or demonstrating our core values (Ease, Value and Trust). Our newest recipient is someone who has been with us for almost 5 ½ years, and here is an amazing number that we want all of you to know about her: two seventy-two (272). That number, 272, represents the total number of globally recognized industry certifications (i.e. Microsoft, CompTIA, Cisco, Adobe, etc.) her students achieved in 2019. Take that number, along with her “can do” attitude, and you have our one and only Mrs. Susan Somerville.
Susan is Senior Student Services Representative. Someone who gets to see first-hand how our programs can touch and change people’s lives. She handles anywhere between 60-80 students at a time, helping them complete their online training on time, practice & study for exams, assisting them in coordinating any special tutoring needs, documenting and distributing monthly reports to counselors, the list goes on and on. She is someone who is always smiling and looking at the positive in everything, even when she has to give a student some “tough love” and remind them of their “Why” and motivator to complete our online programs. Her work directly impacts our students and their success in achieving their end goal: gaining employment. She has changed many people’s lives.
Here is what some of the leaders who nominated her had to say: “Susan has an amazing ability to help her students’ progress and is a pro at having the ‘hard conversations’ with them.” Another person said “she’s very helpful in our Cedar office, has a wonderfully positive attitude, and strives each day to help her students succeed.” Another added “she truly lives our mission of improving employability for her students, every day.”
When we presented Susan with the award she was actually spending the day in our St. George, UT office sharing best practices to some of our newer student service representatives so they can do their jobs as effectively.
Congratulations Susan for a job well done. Keep being present, doing your job, and making LearnKey better every day!
Ease, Value & Trust- LearnKey’s Key Contributor award winner all that and more
When you have great people it drives the engine of success for your company. Our newest Key Contributor Award Winner- Jacob Gardner is right at the center of that engine. Because of his work ethic over the past four (4) years, respect he has gained from his peers, he epitomizes our core values; Ease, Value and Trust. Every day he comes in and seamlessly does his job better than anyone can on the planet. Technical support, computer ordering (a big part of his job that has doubled over the past year), testing, telecom support he does it all and always as if it is no big deal.
We always talk about our “Why”- Improving Employability Every Day. Jacob knows the work he does directly ties to helping our customers: counselors, K-12 students, adult learners and veterans gain the key skills and industry certifications they need to improve their employability skills.
Just like last quarters Key Contributor Award Winner , a team member who is well respected, we are very fortunate to have him as part of our technical support team working in at our headquarters in St. George, Utah.
Please join me in congratulating Jacob for a job well done.
Bravo!
Newest Key Contributor Award Winner truly believes our “Why”
For a company to be on the same page it has helped a great deal that everyone knows our “Why” – Improving Employability Every Day. Our newest Key Contributor Award recipient Beth Ciaramello lives it every day as our Chief Employability Officer.
Beth’s job is to connect our students to employers, work study programs, and get them job ready/hired. She is also quite worldly as one of her personal accomplishments last year was traveling abroad working remotely.
She is being recognized for taking on three major projects, creating and implementing a ProScan to Placement process (P2P), finding new great talent to support the new process, taking over Brighton Colleges Employability activities, and taking over all recruiting and hiring for LearnKey staff (yes we are hiring).
Her “can do attitude” has resulted in two awesome new team members (Jeff & Wendy) based in Scottsdale, who have learned the P2P process and fully implemented it. We now have improved tracking and placements for both Brighton and LearnKey. Additionally, Beth continues to recruit awesome talent and truly displays our core values (ease, value, and trust).
The value she brings to our internal teams and external customers is exceptional. A great example is a recent partnership she has established with a new employer to our programs. This has required a lot of moving parts to come together and she has stayed with it all the way.
As a leader she knows our business and students as well as anyone else. One of her greatest qualities is the ease in which she works with everyone. Always willing to listen, offer advice and support no matter what. What that has left along the way is a tremendous amount of trust between Beth and everyone she interacts with on our teams.
We are so fortunate to have you on our team. Congratulations Beth for always keeping our Why – Improving Employability Every Day front and center for all of us.
Best,
Jeff
In Sheena We Trust!
Our newest Key Contributor Award winner is Sheena Chamberlain and in Sheena we trust.
This year LearnKey is rolling out new technology and tools so our learners have the best learning experience. The first roll out was enhancements to our student information system (SIS 2.0) in February this year. That was no easy task, however, having lots of expertise in-house that project was more manageable.
Our new Learning Management System has been a huge undertaking and in development for well over a year. This is new state of the art technology that has yet to be rolled out enterprise wide.
In January 2019 we realized we needed an A+ team player to begin to manage the beta testing and early adoption of this new system. In a perfect world someone would have come on board and had several months to get up to speed by working with the developers, our in house designers and production team. That did not happen.
What happened was Sheena Chamberlain stepped up an said “I can do this” without any hesitation. Not only did she have a tremendous “can do attitude” but she also quickly realized that there was more work to do, then anyone had anticipated. What did she do? What she is best at which is managing people and process. Soon, she had twelve (12) internal team members working on fixing labs, rebuilding courses, coordinating development efforts and managing new customer expectations. She did all this while continuing to do her normal job.
What jumped out with all of us is how she truly demonstrated our core values: Ease, Value and Trust, with Trust leading the way. She was open, honest, told it like it was, didn’t make excuses or complain that things were not they way they were portrayed. She just took it on herself to make it right.
I want to take this moment to congratulate Sheena for staying the course with a positive attitude, persistence and always taking the high road. We are so fortunate to have her on board and in the next thirty (30) days we will be launching this new LMS!
In Sheena we trust!
Key Contributor Award Winner- On the road again!
One of the most difficult jobs is one that requires a ton of travel. It can be extremely lonely and quite challenging with flight schedules, uncomfortable hotel beds, rental cars, and meeting people that are not always as passionate about their jobs as we are. That is not the case for our most recent Key Contributor Award winner – Kelly Woods. He travels no matter what weather conditions are on his journey.
See, Kelly is a Veteran, and his job is to meet with VA counselors and spread the word on how our programs help Veterans get jobs in IT, Cyber Security, Networking, Programming, Graphic Design, and Help Desk/Customer Service. When we say LearnKey truly is Improving Employability Every Day, Kelly is the face of that statement. He takes his job seriously and never hesitates to help out another Veteran or counselor when they inquire about our programs or if they need assistance along their journey. Our programs are not easy, which is why it’s important that Kelly does not mince words in that the program will be hard, but the reward will be great!
Of course Kelly attributes all our success to his supporting team members, which include the other Regional Representatives, LearnKey’s production and support teams, and the great job ready team and tutors, along with our student support representatives. It takes a team and Kelly takes pride in that he has a great team.
Thank you Kelly for your contributions and keeping our core values – EASE, VALUE and TRUST – top of mind.
LearnKey Video Production team takes top honors!
It is one thing to task a video production team to create the best video based training IT & Career Ready courses, then its another when the not only meet and exceed their goal, but decide to move their entire office at the same time.
I am pleased to announce Marian Eckley, Neil Olsen and Seth Magers are the recipients of LearnKey’s Key Contributor Award for the second Quarter of this year! They truly represent our core values Ease- with the way the managed to transition out of one studio into another, Value- in that during the entire move the managed to stay ahead of the production goal and trust – making sure everything was done just right. That included finding the right office, negotiating a win/win lease and coordinating the move at a time when there would be no delay in production. just like previous LearnKey Key Contributor Award winners they achieved these results without being told what to do!
Our senior instructor Jason Manibog had this to say ” Marian started with getting the right person lined up to understand what we needed in a new office (i.e. decent space, little noise, the right price, etc.). From there, Seth and Neil took the “can do” approach to coordinating the removal of what was not needed and coordinating what needed to be moved.
LearnKey’s “Why” is Improving Employability Every Day. This team makes sure our courses “scream ” that message and I am just glad that their new office is something that gives them the best environment to keep doing that with each and every course they produce.
Please join me in congratulating them!
Key Contributor Award winners: Always making sure we dot our “I’s” and cross our “T’s”
Today I am please to announce our Key Contributor award winners for Q4 2017: Val Deuel, Bart Giddings, Sheena Chamberlain, and Leigh Kulbacki.
Just like all our employees, they play a very important role in our company, as one of the most important aspects to our business is making sure that all of our digital employability learning solutions have the proper grammar and spelling for all our assessments, labs, and written content. They must also ensure all our video training has the quality so we always deliver an exceptional learning experience. Thanks to our awesome Quality Control team they are always there to catch all the errors and help us avoid re-work.
This past year they took it one step further by taking on transcribing and closed captioning most of our courses released in 2017. That was an amazing accomplishment as the results were transcribing 51 sessions and completing the closed captioning for 31 sessions. This resulted in a 27% increase in productivity!
Our “why” is improving employability every day. My goal is to make sure that everyone in the company knows how they impact that why. I am proud of this team as they truly know the importance of their role in our company and really stand for our core values: Ease, Value, and Trust!
Please join me and the rest of the LearnKey/Better Learning Systems family in congratulating them on this great accomplishment, and one thing is for sure: they are not going to like that I wrote this blog without them checking it before it gets posted! But what the heck, sometimes you have to go out on the edge. After all, it’s the thought that counts!