LearnKey Blog

Tag: Certification

Tom Carpenter discusses A+ 2012

Our next CompTIA A+ Certification course is coming closer and closer to completion. As you may know, this version is hosted by Tom Carpenter, a course author who has worked with us quite a bit in the past. This is Tom’s first A+ course with LearnKey, and some of you may not have had the chance to see any of his other work before, so we wanted to make sure your questions and concerns were answered.

Our own Paula Pixley contacted Tom for an interview, in which he discusses his years of IT experience, his past work with LearnKey, and what kind of approach he takes to teaching the A+ objectives.

Share your story!

We love to hear people’s success stories. Whether you’re a teacher implementing LearnKey courseware in your classroom, or you’re a learner yourself using LearnKey courseware to advance your career, It’s a great feeling to know something we created made an impact in someone’s life.

That’s why we want you to share your stories! Let us know how our courseware helped you land that new job, or how blending eLearning in your classroom raised your pass rates, or how implementing a training program helped increase productivity at your business. We may even choose your testimonial to be featured on our website!

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Submit your story to one of our social media profiles:

  • Facebook: Leave a post on our Timeline, or create a post on your own and tag us by adding @LearnKey
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…or leave a comment on this post with your story. Be sure to include which courses were involved and if any certifications were earned using our courseware.

We’re not picky about the format either – you can type it out, record a video, include pictures, whatever you want to do!

New “Certify for Life” program available for Veterans

We have recently implemented a new program for veterans who certify through our Veteran Services program – it’s called Certify for Life. This is an excellent new program that can help save veterans hundreds if not thousands of dollars throughout the course of their career.

The way this program can help save veterans money is by giving them free courseware updates for the rest of their life. So, in four to five years when technology advances and makes certain certifications out of date, the veteran doesn’t have to pay for courseware again, they don’t have to try to get the VA to cover the courses and they don’t have to pay out of pocket either – all they have to do is call LearnKey and let them know that they are in the Certify for Life program and LearnKey will get them set up with the current courseware in their area of study for free.

eLearning Company Announces Free Training for U.S. Veterans

LearnKey’s “Certify for Life” program enables qualified U.S. veterans to receive video-based training, free of charge, after they’ve completed their initial training certifications through VA-sponsored programs such as VR&E and VRAP.

ST. GEORGE, UT, May 11, 2012 /24-7PressRelease/ — LearnKey, a global provider of self-paced online training, today announced “Certify for Life,” a new program that provides free education for qualifying U.S. veterans. Certify for Life is available to veterans who participate in Vocational Rehabilitation & Employment (VR&E), Veterans Retraining Assistance Program (VRAP) and VOW to Hire Heroes programs offered through the Veterans Administration.

Read the full press release

Visit veterans.learnkey.com for more information on our Veteran Services program.

A+ 2012 Filming

Recently I had the opportunity to travel to the Salt Lake City office to see some of the filming of our newest CompTIA A+ Certification courseware – presented by Tom Carpenter. Tom has presented quite a few of our IT courses, and if you’ve ever taken one of them before, you know that he’s a great choice to take the lead on the next version of LearnKey’s most popular courseware series. If you haven’t seem Tom in action, watch this video in which he discusses our Voice over IP Fundamentals course:

From what I’ve seen, this course is going to be one of the best, most engaging courses LearnKey has ever produced. Our production teams are going all out to make it entertaining as well as educational, so if you’ve been wanting to get your A+ certification, you’ll definitely want to stick around for this release.

For more video clips, check out our YouTube Channel. Tom has presented many LearnKey courses, so there are plenty of videos to choose from if you would like to dive in.

…and of course, there is always the infamous Blooper Reel!

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!

Veteran benefits provide certifications and new job skills through LearnKey courseware

I just want to write a few words about a friend of mine that I met through our VA vocational rehabilitation program. Chris and I were introduced over this last summer when he began using the LearnKey program to advance his IT career. At the time, he was working in an IT role, but in a limited, part time position. Over several months of interaction, I have come to think of Chris as a friend as our whole group has been following his progress and cheering his success. In January, I was able to meet Chris face to face as he came into our recording studio to shoot a testimonial video. It was a great experience to get better acquainted and to learn that Chris served as a combat engineer in Baghdad, the same role in which my father served during WW2.

Continue reading “Veteran benefits provide certifications and new job skills through LearnKey courseware”

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!

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.