Category: Insights
Home for the holidays and a great start to 2022
It was so awesome to have holiday party celebrations this past year, and then before you know it, it is 2022.
This had to be the fastest holiday season ever! The month of December was filled with awesome holiday parties starting with our Know Your Talents Holiday Party on Thursday, December 9th, in Scottsdale, Arizona, at Pubblico Italian Eatery. It was fun to celebrate the holiday as well as moving into our new office located: 10446 N 74th St Suite 100, Scottsdale, AZ 85258 (southeast corner of Shea Blvd and Scottsdale Rd.)
Next stop was St. George, Utah, for a great virtual party on Wednesday, December 15th. I have to say more folks enjoyed that than I ever would have imagined. We had gingerbread contests, music contests, and really made a good time of it. Then we had our party at Milt’s in Cedar City, Utah, Friday, December 17th. We had over forty (40) employees, spouses, and significant others for a wonderful celebration. The air was chill, plenty of stars out up the canyon – a great time. Then the Salt Lake City team had their party Saturday, December 18th, at Rodizio Grill in downtown, which was a blast. Lots of people, protein, and crazy conversation.
It was so well needed for us to reconnect, and we started the first of the year by having an awesome knowledge drop covering LearnKey’s 2022 course production schedule last week!
This week it is all about finalizing goals with each team and I cannot be more proud of how focused and on point everyone is as we continue to focus on getting better every day.
Core Values and Passion for People is what this Key Contributor Award Winner is all about
When people trust you, they do business with you. Our newest Key Contributor Award Winner (okay, she has actually received this award before) exemplifies that tenfold.
That is why I am thrilled to announce Melanie Benitez as our 2021 2nd Quarter Key Contributor Award winner! This past year, like many other years, Melanie has won the trust of not only her team members but also our clients.
Melanie has been at the forefront of Managing Customer Success for Know Your Talents, the Corporate Division of LearnKey. Here is what her team members said during the nomination “Melanie epitomizes our core values: Ease, Value, and Trust. She has done a fabulous job at creating our ‘stickiness’ with our Enterprise Development Solution clients. As a result they are becoming smarter, successful with PDP, and more educated than ever before due to the process and solutions Melanie and her team are providing for them. ”
Melanie and her team are now providing continuous webinars, Mentor Certifications, and 1-1 coaching to the tune of 100s of hours with leaders within our customer base. This has driven much more growth to the business and she has been responsible for ensuring the renewals and exceeding customer expectations for our valued clients, naming a few that include HPone, Pioneer Title, and Creative Testing Solutions.
One quality Melanie possesses above and beyond is her ability to gain tremendous client loyalty. This comes from who she is, which is an amazing team member and someone we are so grateful to have on our team.
Please join me in congratulating Melanie — once again!
LearnKey Production: Mid-year course release schedule includes Key Information Technology & Business courses
We are so proud of our LearnKey Production team. At LearnKey these days of summer are always super busy getting ready for updating our key certification pathways and rolling out new ones. With schools back to school in less than sixty (60) days we need to make sure our diverse course library is ready come August.
Big shout out to: JJ, Natasha, Dallas, Mer, Seth, Neil, Brad, Bill, Krista, Sheena, Shar, Annalise, Max, Kaitlin, Shelly, Daniel, Jason, Val, Bart and I probably missed a few (not) they are just pedal to the metal.
Three observations:
New IT Pathway: This one we are excited about which is Certiport’s new IT Specialist Certification program. This pathway has relevant certifications which is why we did this as a LearnKey signature series with them mapping to the ten (10) (i.e. databases, network security, JavaScript, HTML & CSS, etc.) key and in-demand certifications. Stay tuned as those will start to be released next month.
Entrepreneurship: Our Entrepreneurship Small Business Certification (ESB v2) update this summer as well. This ESB program has come along way and does a great job addressing the skills required to become self employed and or truly start your own business.
Growing Popularity: Requests for improving communication skills is a topic on the rise. One thing has become very clear teachers, counselors and students want relevant content that covers these basic key skills. Especially for those getting ready to or already in the job market. We have seen a significant interest in this topic and the course we did with Jennifer Stubblefield titled “Communication Skills for Business” is one of our most popular courses right now!
Till next month – Stay cool!
LearnKey acquires online school Brighton College & The Paralegal Institute
Brighton & The Paralegal Institutes short term career pathways aligns with LearnKey’ strategy to expand into healthcare and legal.
Last week was another exciting milestone with LearnKey acquiring 100% of Brighton College & The Paralegal Institute. We have owned 50% of Brighton since 2014 and taking full ownership is something we are very excited about.
It has been over a year in the making, however, the pandemic through some challenges our way, but we made happen this year and that is good news. We continue to focus on our goal of increasing career pathway offerings in in high job demand fields like: Allied Health , Legal Medical and Paralegal studies.
More exiting news is our course production team is having an amazing month with wrapping up our newest Security+ course, and preparing our IT Specialist track along with much more in our quest to always be “improving employability every day” for our students, teachers, counselors and partners.
Azure AI Fundamentals Course (AI-900) a first of many to come
We are excited to announce the release of our new Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) course, our first in our Azure Series of courses.
Here is a quick clip and notice the HD video quality makes for a great preview and also learn more about Object Detection.
LearnKey’s Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) course is an introduction to building artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning models. The course also covers basic AI concepts, giving those who take this course an increase in skills needed to land an introductory AI-based job.
Specific exam topics include AI workloads and considerations, fundamental principles of machine learning, computer vision workloads, Natural Language Processing (NLP) workloads, and conversational AI workloads.
This course offers a web version for all labs and assessments to accommodate students accessing the courseware remotely on Chromebooks.
Also included are LearnKey’s: Student workbook (PDF) with additional projects, activities, glossary key terms and definitions to help reinforce learning. Teacher workbook (PDF) with answer keys, lesson plans and short cut keys ensure instructors have everything they need for in the classroom . With a course Total Time of 25 Hours and the supplemental materials its a great way to begin your AI certification credentials.
As for job demand the outlook is really good. Globally AI/Machine learning jobs are projected to be worth almost $31 billion by 2024. That’s an annual growth rate of more than 40% over a six-year period.
Those statistics underscore the need for machine learning talent, and if you’re willing to put in the work, you could be on your way to a great new career.
National Radio Host touts Know Your Talents
What a great conversation Scottsdale Arizona resident and national radio host Dave Pratt had with Lori Coruccini and Julie Plummer last Friday, during his weekly podcast, discussing the benefits of learning about your natural talents (behavior).
For me it was a trip down memory lane. Dave Pratt has been a longtime radio personality, known to his fans as the “Morning Mayor”. His show Dave Pratt in the Morning became the longest running rock and roll morning show in the United States. Pratt has sold more than 100,000 albums with his band, headlining sold-out shows in major venues throughout Arizona.
The podcast covered many topics but it was all around learning about what the KYT team does for customers. Take a listen here.
If you want to go to a specific topic during the podcast below is the time in and topic:
1.30 sec: Secret Sauce- Its all around ProScan
3.25 sec: KYT History – Staffing background?
6.11 sec: Business renewal rate of 85%
6.30 sec: How utilizing ProScan builds trust
9.00 sec: Company Strategy – Yes Behavior plays a role
10.30 sec: Job modeling with top performers
11.25 sec: Motivation Review how to use it
14.00 sec: 4 types of behaviors
18:00 : Do owners and executives take these seriously?
19:00: Positives of learning about your talents
21:45 sec: You made your husband take this BEFORE you said yes? 23:00: Lori talks about Dave’s behavior- what a good guy😊
Yes, the truth is she did make me take the ProScan survey. Its been an exciting couple of weeks with the announcement of the acquisition of Know Your Talents and now this great podcast. Thanks Dave for supporting our cause.
LearnKey makes strategic acquisition
It gives me great pleasure to announce that LearnKey has acquired Know Your Talents (KYT), a long time sister company. This move enables us to grow our corporate business, through providing a comprehensive and customized Enterprise Development Solution for customers that further integrates leveraging ones behavior to benefit their learning & career experience.
The past year one of our goals was to connect our career pathways at LearnKey with matching behaviors of individuals who are successful in those careers. Therefore, when our students take a ProScan survey they will receive recommended career pathways that align to their natural talents. This is great for career exploration and upskilling.
The KYT team is passionate about helping companies develop a great culture that is unique and attractive to successful like-minded people in their organizations. Our teams (both KYT & LK) collectively have been working together for years helping our students complete their online learning programs and obtain employment. We are excited to take this to the next level with companies that want the best for their employees’ development.
Newest winner delivers LearnKey an awesome makeover!
By the end of last year we successfully rolled out a new LearnKey.com website and we have our newest Key Contributor Award Winner Brad Washburn to thank for that. We call Brad our “utility player”, due to the roles he can perform at LearnKey. This project was something Brad worked on for months at the end of last year and required a lot of collaboration with not only internal LearnKey team members, but also external web developers. The new site features storefront functionality, new messaging, and layout that is much more clear and understandable than the previous website.
Brad truly demonstrated our core values Ease, Value, and Trust. He was easy to work with throughout the project, his contributions were of significant value, and all team members on the project could trust that the work would be done, and done right.
Here is what Beau Shakespear, who nominated Brad had to say “Brad went through every single page of the old website (hundreds of pages) and updated, redirected, or deleted pages. He was patient when Kim and I would ask him to make edits live then change our minds and have him change it back. Brad is always great to work with and always did what he said he was going to do.” He also met every single deadline to ensure this was done by year end. It has been over ten (10) years that we had such an improvement to our website.
We were excited to share Brad’s receipt of this award during our monthly all hands video conference call last week. We feel so fortunate to have team members like Brad and also other 2020 Key Contributor award winners like Jade Brown, Jeff Martin, Annalise Sluder, and Susan Somerville. They all made major contributions to our 2020 success.
LearnKey validates AI & Micro-Pathways in top 10 online education trends
As we welcome in 2021, it’s exciting to see how online education is evolving and the impact it will have in the future.
At LearnKey we were thrilled to see key solutions initiatives we have in place hit Guide2Research’s top 10 online education trends for 20/21. This further validates the “what and why” behind how important these initiatives are and the impact they can have for generations to come.
This first one, #4 AI provides Personalized Learning Pathways. We have been working with our Know Your Talents division leveraging the PDP Global behavioral assessment so when a student completes the assessment/survey, they receive a list of career micro-pathways, which feature LearnKey certification courses, and recommendations to those pathways that match their behavior for the best fit. Why we did this is so our students could have at their finger tips great career exploration information.
The second one, #6 Video-based learning expands to maximize the impact of mobile learning. LearnKey has been doing multimedia courseware that features video-based learning for over 30 years. We have now implemented better learning management technology to ensure our students have the best learning experience on any device.
We are off to a great start for 2021 and have also rolled out a new website, so be sure to visit www.learnkey.com and learn more about new services and offerings.
Key Contributor Award Winner: Making it right for our students
We had a great company all hands video conference call yesterday. Just so nice to see everyone, celebrate some of our successes YTD, welcome new team members and announce our 3rd Quarter Key Contributor Award Winner. Just like our previous KCA winner, this person is someone truly having a positive impact on our students.
When we talk about our “Why” Improving employability every day and our core values Ease, Value and Trust this individual is someone all of us have become to respect and appreciate the great work she does helping our students to ensure they are qualified and ready to onboard into our IT Certification Pathways programs. She is very respectful and easy to get along with, has brought tremendous value as an individual and team contributor and someone who has earned the trust of everyone she works with at LearnKey as well as the counselors we serve.
Which is why it gives me great honor to announce that Jade Brown was the recipient of our Key Contributor Award winner this quarter.
Over the last year and a half Jade has implemented, streamlined and improved our enrollment process by developing a vetting process to ensure our students are qualified to be in our program. In addition she is directly responsible from growing this role into a team. Her hard work has directly correlated to having more successful & motivated students/learners better qualified to start are programs. Jade is the type of team players that has a great attitude and ” will do whatever it takes to get the job done” .
Organizationally, Jade took the lead and wrote training manuals and SOP’s for new LK team members so they can successfully onboard in the enrollment department. Her leader, Kelly had this to say “We have great LK team members but man I believe Jade is one of the hardest workers we have” Couple that with her professionalism and courtesy we congratulate you Jade on this great accomplishment.
We all know this has been a challenging year and it’s so exciting to know that we can have some peace of mind in knowing we are making a difference in people’s lives during these times.
Whether its knowing that we helped over forty-six (46) of our students get hired, or helping a student get certified, offering free employability skills training for those unemployed, or assisting the counselors and teachers that are dealing with allot of stress and challenges, yes we have those challenges too, however, they way our team has come together to handle these situations makes me truly proud of each and everyone one of our team members. Our Senior Instructor also had us excited about the current course (IT fundamentals) he and the production team are working on, listening to his passion really made all of us appreciate the hard work that goes into producing courses like this one.
Staying connected during these times is important and we will continue to do that. Today was nice and tomorrow will be better.
