Know Me. Grow Me. Include Me. Inspire Me.

Wow, this year is going fast, and as we reflect on the first quarter of this year we were thrilled to hear we had over thirty (30) veteran students get placed in jobs the first quarter of this year. It was also nice to see that the entry level IT Professional annual salary was over $65,000 a year. Additionally, we set a record for the number of certifications achieved by our students in March, topping over 143! IT certifications are a great way to demonstrate competency with potential employers and hiring managers.

What is next? How about our new messaging: Know Me. Grow Me. Include Me. Inspire Me. This is something we are so excited about as it matches who we are and what we want to do with our corporate customers, as well as the students that complete our signature Blue Ocean programs. It’s all about growth, development, investing, and engaging with people that make a great culture.

The fact that we can take feedback from corporate customers and incorporate that feedback into our courses, it gives us a competitive advantage, as we know exactly what customers are looking for in the new world remote/hybrid workforce. Example is when an employer survey shares that the top three life skills/reasons graduates fail in the workforce are Emotional Intelligence, Coachability, and Motivation, you can bet we are going to focus on it within our courseware and our employability team.

LearnKey Production 2022: Network+, ITS Cyber Security , A+ and More!

Here we grow! February is almost over, and boy are we busy. We have onboarded amazing new team members (Donna, Sydney, Sarah, and Larae) and in last month’s blog we were reflecting on the holidays. Now we are less than a week away from March. Q1 2022 is almost over- yikes!

Super excited about our amazing production team. Our Senior Instructor Jason Manibog just finished up Network+, and now he and our production team are already filming A+. These are super big LearnKey Signature courses and our production team is on it.

CompTIA is a signature track for LearnKey and, just as we did last year with CompTIA’s new Security+, our team has created an amazing learning scenario to be the theme of this course.

Since I joined LearnKey in 2011, we have always incorporated scenario-based learning as part of our theme for every signature course we produce. It really puts relevance to learning, and that is what we are all about.

Next month I will share some exciting news about our messaging for 2022.

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.