Author: Jeff
Incredible attitude & impeccable kindness describes key contributor award winner
One of the greatest assets LearnKey has is our people who drive a great culture. Years of reinforcing our core values, Ease, Value, & Trust, the dividends continue to pay to this day. We know we are fortunate to have awesome team members, especially during these times. Which is why it is so important to celebrate and recognize individuals and teams for their accomplishments.
Our newest quarterly Key Contributor Award Winner Annalise Sluder, LearnKey’s lead writer, is a perfect example. We were pretty excited about launching a new course earlier this year (non IT) covering Communication Skills for Business (CSB), one of the first communication skills certification courses of its kind.
Annalise took extra steps to ensure it was a success. Her manager Marion had this to say: “Always a ‘can do’ attitude and what really stuck out is since taking the lead writing position she has stepped up to better the writing process, trained other team members in Natasha, and M’lissa, then got certified in the CSB course to make sure the workbook and tests were the best they could be. She truly lives our core values, ease, value and trust.”
LearnKey’s Senior Instructor, Jason Manibog had this to say: “We put Annalise in the Lead Writer role and man, has she taken on the lead, with an emphasis on lead. She has steered the writing in a perfect direction, organized all the standards, communicates and adjusts perfectly to our standards and the needs for each course, and she has put anyone who touches writing tasks in the best position to succeed. I know I’ve had to worry far less about how tests/workbooks are as we the authors give her the ‘look’ needed for a course and she takes it from there.”
Our Chief Employability Officer, Beth Ciaramello said something that was so sweet after everyone else chimed in. She said, “Plus, Annalise has an incredible attitude and treats everyone with impeccable kindness.”
That said it all and we sure did enjoy celebrating your award during our all-hands company meeting this past Wednesday, April 29th, 2020!
Bravo Annalise congratulations we are blessed to have you on our team. Every quarter this award gets harder and harder to award as there are so many of our team members who are always going above and beyond to reinforce our “Why”: Improving Employability Every Day.
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!
LearnKey 2020 Goal: Start Fast
At LearnKey we like to start the new year fast. So 2020 is here and we are super happy we just completed one of our most important goals: LearnKey’s new Certification and Support Program catalog. This truly is our calling card, as it gives you the opportunity to learn and access the great courses, career pathways/programs, and support we offer through our national online vocational school and education as a service business we provide to businesses and strategic partners.
For 2020 we expanded and added over twenty (20) enhanced career pathways with multiple levels (i.e. entry & advanced) as our research continues to validate that these are high in-demand jobs that lead to upward mobility careers. Specifically, in the areas of Cyber-Security, Help Desk, Networking, Cloud, Programming, and System Administration.
We hope you enjoy our catalog as we are very proud on how we present our offerings, products, and services to those schools, counselors, and organizations who want to help learners get jobs. Another skill in demand is communication, and a course we are pleased to be releasing this month is Communication Skills for Business, which maps to one of the first globally recognized industry certifications offered through Certiport.
We at LearnKey believe our catalog is the purest example of who we are, what we do, and why we do it.
Of course everyone knows our “Why” – Improving Employability Every Day
Best,
Jeff
Holiday celebration with a great trip through Utah
Last week was a whirlwind! It started Friday, December 6th in our St. George corporate office. Both my wife and I were excited to meet our newest team member Shelbie Miller and catch up with recent “newbies” Paula Terry and Camille Wasek. We feel so fortunate to have such an amazing team.
Saturday morning we attended a team building event assisting in the move of Kimberly Johnson “aka” the collector! It was so exciting as she moved into her first new home! A beautiful place and we could not be more happy for Kim and her family. That night we had our holiday party for both St. George and Cedar City offices at Rusty’s Ranch House in Cedar City (see picture). What a turn out and congrats to Jessica Staples and Jordan Cook – winners of our Left, Right, Center Challenge.
Monday, December 9th we met with our St. George team members and I survived a BIG PRANK whereas Mr. Jared Baker decided to scare me with one of his friends who is an Arizona Sheriff, pretending to arrest him by chasing him out the building. All I can think about is how I plan to get back at him. What is that saying “Paybacks are a…”
Tuesday was fun filled as our LearnKey leadership team was sharing their end of year results and 2020 goals for next year. We are so proud as they will be presenting these findings to our board later this month. WE HAVE HAD A GREAT YEAR. That day we also did a “team building workout” with the entire staff lead by our Chief Employability Officer Ms. Beth Ciaramello. It was eye opening for all of us and a great way to improve our communication skills.
Wednesday we spent the majority of the day in our Cedar office again Ms. Ciaramello facilitated an awesome team building workout. Then it was off to Orem, UT.
Thursday we celebrated our partnership with Certiport providing lunch at their offices, followed up with a dinner that included both Certiport and GMetrix partners from their respective leadership teams. Our ask was – What can we do better to make the partnership stronger! The feedback was positive and with a focus of “keep doing what you are doing now because it is working”. Music to my ears.
Friday morning was spent with our GMetrix partner checking out their new offices and then lunch with one of our fearless leaders Marian Eckley. She has done an amazing job leading our entire production team this past year.
Saturday, December 14th, we had our holiday celebration with our Salt Lake City team at Carvers Steak & Seafood House in Sandy, UT (see picture). The service and food was fantastic but the company was incredible.
Throughout the entire trip the observations were consistent while the teams acknowledged we had success and growth this year, better than any of the past years, ALL THEY WANT TO DO IS GET BETTER. You see that is the mentality and culture of our teams always wanting to do better.
This week we end our holiday road trip with celebrations in Scottsdale with our Brighton College team members and the Know Your Talents team. Which again, will focus on a look back and more effort towards getting better.
My wife made it very clear as her observation was we should feel very blessed to have so many great people on the same page, with the same focus- HOW CAN WE GET BETTER.
Now that is a true team.
Jeff
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
Learn In-demand Skills, Obtain Industry Certifications and Always Have a Plan “B”
My father taught me many years ago to learn a trade or in-demand skill, as well as always have a plan “B”. In this day and age that is so important, especially for those in high school, going to college, or adults trying to obtain a well-paying job. It just so happens I took that advice back in the 80’s and learning my first skill/certification was how to use American Airlines “Sabre” reservation system. See, my trade was working in a travel agency. I learned reservations, ticketing, operations, business development, and sales.
Knowing and getting certified in multiple reservation systems like Sabre, United Airlines Apollo system, TWA’s PARS, and a few others allowed me to go from doing reservations to becoming a team lead, then operations supervisor, to Director, then V.P./General Manager. Yes, I was climbing the corporate ladder, even ran start-ups over my 30-year career.
But it all started with making sure I had skills. Now, in this day and age “first jobs” are on the cusp of being eliminated this article that speaks to “AI is replacing first jobs” which is very concerning but not surprising due to advances in technology. So now more than ever, I stress to everyone learn a skill/trade, get certified, so you can have a fall back plan “B”. College degrees are important, however, in today’s world so is getting certified in many fields such as: Technology, Allied Health, STEM, Legal, and many more.
The good news is its not just me advocating the importance of certifications. A recent Forbes article just came out titled “non-degree certificates and certifications are fast, cheap and effective”. This is a great read and while they are not necessarily cheap it validates how important non-degree certificates and globally-recognized industry certifications are in today’s workforce. Here are some key highlights of the article & survey which are sure worth sharing:
- Adults with a short-term certificate or industry-based certification were more likely to be employed (85%) than adults without such credentials (78%).
- Adults holding certificates reported their median annual income to be $45,000, compared to $30,000 for adults without any certificates.
- Among the non-degree adults with a certificate or certification, two-thirds were inclined to recommend the educational path they had followed to others, compared to less than half of the non-degreed adults without such credentials.
- Among certificate/certification holders, 60% believed their educational experiences made them more marketable to potential employers, compared to 44% of those who had not earned certificates or certifications.
At LearnKey we are all about “improving employability every day” and we do that through ensuring our message around “Learn a skill, Practice as part of your preparation, and get Certified” is loud and clear. The world is changing and now more then ever, you need to have a plan “B” and I have my father to thank for that!
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!
Newest Key Contributor Award Winner has “Workbook” Mania
Yes, Improving Employability Every Day is our “Why” and how we do that is through making great courses so youth and adult learners gain Industry IT Certifications, graduate our programs, and get employed! While LearnKey is known for great Video-based training we do provide additional content with each course including: labs, assessments, lesson plans and workbooks. Therefore, our production team consisting of video editors, technical writers, quality control, and system support staff have to always be working in sync to meet our course deadlines.
Our newest Key Contributor Award Winner M’Lissa Woods is making quite a name for herself by leveraging her amazing technical writing skills. M’Lissa joined us in July 2018 her first project was to complete Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) workbooks for courses we shot earlier in the year. She jumped right in and after four months completed more than double, ten (10) workbooks a normal writer could complete in that period. Her ability to process work alone with focus and strong organizational skills are second to none.
This not only ensured we released these courses on time but she also really embraced our core values (Ease, Value, and Trust) which is huge for our culture. Her work is of great Value requiring minimal QC efforts, she immediately built a great deal of Trust with her peers, and she is very Easy to work with as noted by her manager and peers.
M’Lissa is going to help us reach our goals for 2019 which by the way are pretty lofty: Produce eighteen (18) courses including Microsoft 2019 series and our Signature CompTIA A+ course, migrate our students to a new learning management system & student information system, as well as provide more tutoring and customer support for our VA students. It is great to know we have employees like M’Lissa on our team to help us along the way.
We feel very fortunate to have M”lissa on board and if her name sounds familiar that is because her husband Kelly Woods is a previous Key Contributor Award Winner– so it runs in the family!
Please join me on congratulating M’Lissa for this great accomplishment.
Future Ready Schools and Lifelong Learning all leads to in-demand 21st Century Skills
We are always looking for organizations that align to our why “Improving Employability Every Day”. Be it social services organizations, K-12 & post secondary schools, employers, and not-for-profits. The good news is there are a lot of programs educators can leverage and share best practices around that are going to help youth, adult, and under-served learners gain key in-demand 21st century skills.
Here is a program we are pretty excited about that enables educators to prepare future-ready schools (FRS). Their effort to maximize digital learning opportunities and help school districts move quickly toward preparing students for success in college, a career, and citizenship is something we fully support and applaud. We work with hundreds of schools and districts nationwide that use our video-based courseware in the Business and Career & Technical Education programs. Every year we learn about more success stories and the FRS program is pretty impressive. The future-ready school programs and partnerships support, thousands of district leaders have planned and implemented personalized, research-based digital learning strategies for millions of students to achieve their full potential.
At LearnKey our goal is to offer employability skills learning programs that teach 21st century in-demand skills. Therefore, we want to ensure our curriculum, instruction style (i.e. scenario-based), and assessments are tightly aligned with and designed to engage students in personalized, technology-empowered, deeper learning experiences that build life-long learning skills. This year our new learning management system (OnlineExpert.com) is getting a significant makeover/technology upgrade that will drive more engagement and collaboration between learners and instructors.
It has been proven that learners who successfully “learn how to learn online” have over a 70% greater chance to become successful lifelong learners. Why is that important to us? Well, since lifelong learning is the “ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated” pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons it not only enhances social inclusion, active citizenship, and personal development, but also self-sustainability, as well as competitiveness and employability. That goes back to our “Why” which is improving employability every day!
Stay tuned as we introduce other successful learning organizations that support great causes such as lifelong learning!
Best,
Jeff Coruccini