Key Contributor Award Winner: All About Improving Employability Every Day!

In January, Better Learning Systems announced our 2016 4^th quarter Key Contributor Award winner, and not only was this person well deserving but she also is about our true “Why,” which is Improving Employability Every Day!

It gives me great pleasure to announce Ms. Jessica Staples as our most recent Key Contributor award winner, someone who is quite familiar with being awesome! She is in good company as previous winners include: Jason Manibog, Kim Johnson & Wyett Ihler, Sarah Blik & Melanie Benitez and of course the rockstar LearnKey Technical Support team!

Jessica is a key member of our LearnKey Veteran Services team, making it through some major transitions over the past few years to help streamline and improve the program. She is also celebrating three (3) years with LearnKey this month. She is a true team player who constantly demonstrates our core values: Ease, Value, and Trust every day!

During the 4^th Quarter, Jessica was an enormous help with training and mentoring our newest VSR, Nina Sepulveda. With her extensive knowledge of the program and eagerness to help, she made the onboarding of Nina an easy process. We can’t thank her enough for her contribution as a team player. When things didn’t work perfectly or go according to plan, she made it work for her students and for LearnKey. She is extremely detailed and every one of her students has nothing but great things to say about her. When she takes on a task we can trust she will get it done, and with all of the I’s dotted and T’s crossed.

In 2016 our LearnKey Veteran Services Team assisted students in achieving over 285 certifications, with Jessica directly supporting 128 of those certifications! Her dedication to helping our students achieve their goals is a true example of value.

Again, please join me in congratulating Jessica for her spirited team work, “can do attitude,” and overwhelming positive and motivational support she provides our student base. She is a great reflection of what it means to be “Improving Employability Every Day”.

Kind Regards,

Jeff Coruccini

Can You Become a QuickBooks Certified User Without Being a CPA? Absolutely!

That question above was one of many questions I got when I used to teach QuickBooks in a classroom setting. I’m not a CPA and I’m a certified QuickBooks user, so you can become one too. What is QuickBooks, you ask? It’s an industry-leading accounting software program, geared toward helping businesses of all sizes organize and perform their accounting duties.

We are currently working on our updated QuickBooks Certified User course, which we have completed filming and are in the process of fine-tuning. This course maps to the 10 domains on the QuickBooks Certified User certification exam. The 10 domains are:

QuickBooks Setup
QuickBooks Utilities and General Product Knowledge
List Management
Items
Sales
Purchases
Payroll
Reports
Basic Accounting
Customization and Shortcuts

Our new QuickBooks course covers these 10 domains in such a way to help you prepare to pass the QuickBooks Certified User exam (done through Certiport) and obtain your QuickBooks Certified User certification. We present the material in a very concise, easy-to-follow format, kind of like the QuickBooks program itself.

This course will have video training, pre-assessment and post-assessment tests, practice labs, and a project workbook, all geared toward solidifying your QuickBooks knowledge not only for the certification, but also to improve your employability prospects for any position requiring QuickBooks knowledge. Or you may have a small business of your own and want solid knowledge of QuickBooks, so you can let it do the major accounting work for you, leaving you to do what you do best—run your business.

So, back to the original question: Can you get the QuickBooks Certified User certification without being a CPA? Yes, indeed! And you can get this without being a financial planner or tax preparation expert or, well, you get the drift.

Stay tuned to this blog space for my update next week. I promise you, it will get “animated” at times!

Outlook 2016 Course and Workbooks Released!

Today, we are excited to announce the release of our Outlook 2016 course.

Outlook 2016

In this course, LearnKey Senior Instructor Jason Manibog will take you through what is needed to become proficient and efficient in Outlook 2016, the personal information management tool in Microsoft Office. Specific topics include: email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes. The course will also prepare you to take exam 77-731, the Microsoft Office Specialist exam for Outlook 2016.

Our hope is that through our courseware we may provide learners with the guidance, preparation, and skills they need to succeed. For more information and to learn about additional LearnKey products visit our website.

2017 Best Training ROI for your employee’s and customers?

It is all about better communication resulting in a better customer experience.

It’s a no-brainer that bad customer service will cost your company business. But it turns out employees’ behavior toward each other can affect your bottom line, too.

So the question is: are your employees properly job ready trained in the areas of dealing with difficult customers, meeting consumer needs, the art of customer service, listening under pressure, workplace ethics, email etiquette, social media at work, and bullying in the workplace?

A well-known study of retailer Sears revealed that a five-point improvement in employee attitude results in a 1.3% increase in customer satisfaction, which then drives an 0.5% increase in company revenue.

Which is why LearnKey’s 2017 video-based training series on customer service is the perfect solution for your organization. It’s relevant for today’s workforce, high quality, available anytime/anywhere, and can help you deliver a solid ROI for both your business customers and, most importantly, your employees.

In today’s digital world it’s all about the customer experience:

What is customer experience and why is it important?

Customer experience is your customers’ perceptions of how your company treats them. These perceptions affect their behaviors, build memories and feelings, and may drive their loyalty. In other words, if they like you and continue to like you, they are going to do business with you and recommend you to others. Note: If one of your customers has a bad experience there is less than a 10% chance they will tell you about it, but they will choose not to do business with you in the future.

Why should you focus on improving your customer experience?

According to a recent walker study, by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as a key differentiator. By now it should be clear that customer service can no longer be relegated to the basement of your brand’s focus. It must be front and center of your organization, alongside marketing, as a priority focus for customer interaction and retention.

Contact us today for a no-cost proof of concept on how this training can improve your ROI.

Premiere Pro CC 2015 Test Prep Released!

Today, we are excited to announce the release of our Premiere Pro CC 2015 Test Prep course.

Premiere Pro CC 2015 Test Prep

LearnKey’s Premiere Pro CC 2015 Test Prep course is a complementary resource to go along with the Premiere Pro CC course, authored by Expert Ryan James. Although the Premiere Pro CC course readies you for the Premiere Pro CC exam, there are new objectives and types of test questions which are covered in the Premiere Pro CC 2015 Test Prep course. LearnKey Senior Instructor Jason Manibog takes you through these changes, so you will have the tools you need to confidently pass the Premiere Pro CC 2015 exam.

Trending 2017 Education as a Benefit (EaaB): Enabling Employers To Retain Great Talent

Great leaders know the importance of continuous education for their employees: “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” – Richard Branson, Founder Virgin Group.

As retention and staff development continue to challenge service companies specifically in the areas of customer service, IT help desk, and front & back office support, we are actively helping our customers solve that problem, as well as improving retaining employees and enhancing their current skillsets.

To that extent, LearnKey can help you build a custom Education as a Benefit (EaaB) program. Customer feedback, as well as findings by a recent Corporate Learning Insiders report surveying top L&D leaders published 1/19/17 on LinkedIn’s learning blog, further validates this need:

A majority, 57%, predict that employers will increase education benefits more than traditional benefits in 2017. Evidence exists that this could be a powerful way to boost retention and keep people from job-hopping as much as they might otherwise in today’s economy.
71% predict that partnering with outside training providers will be the best strategy to get ahead of the widening skills gap.
Additionally, Insiders believe that micro-learning content delivered in small, specific segments – and on-demand learning – content accessible at any time, from any device – will see the most growth among learning technologies in 2017

Closing The Skills Gap

What’s interesting given the projected education-as-a-benefit trend is that many have noted that the skills gap is not entirely caused by educational organizations inadequately preparing students for today’s jobs, but also by employers retreating from investing enough in the training of new employees.

Let us schedule a demo today so you can learn how LearnKey’s experts can customize career pathways for your employees by leveraging our digital and video-based training library that covers topics in the areas of Technology, Customer Service, Professional Development, Microsoft office, and more.

LearnKey to produce Entrepreneurship Small Business Certification Course that Maps to Certiport ESB exam

Today we are excited to announce that LearnKey will begin production next week on an “Exam Ready” video-based training course that maps to Certiport’s Entrepreneurship Small Business (ESB) certification and will be available in April 2017!

This course will be authored by Wyett Ihler, certified instructor who has produced LearnKey’s IC3 GS5 & Spark courses over the past year. This course will help students/adult learners and teachers prep for the ESB certification exam, which is a 50-minute exam with 45 questions covering the following objectives: The Entrepreneur, Business Management, Starting a Business, Business Operations, Marketing/Sales, and Financial Management. In addition to the course being available on LearnKey’s OnlineExpert Learning Management System, the course will be available through our strategic partner GMetrix‘s skills management system.

We are thrilled to offer such an exciting and in-demand certification training, as the U.S. Department of Labor and the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) both cite statistics that underscore the benefits of entrepreneurship education. These benefits include improved academic performance, school attendance, interest in attending college, an increase in occupational aspirations, as well as leadership behavior.

LearnKey is all about helping learners improve their employability skills and this course covers an important topic that currently has no certification/validation of skills tied to it.

What I Have Been Up To This Year

Greetings, one and all. I hope you all had a good January. The snow and cold around here means no golf for me which means no fun, but, I digress. I’m here to talk upcoming courses, as in what our crew has been filming and putting together for upcoming releases. This month, we actually filmed three of these and I’m here to fill you all in on what we are working on and how these courses will help your certification prospects and your employability. After all, our CEO, Jeff Coruccini, penned a couple of weeks ago our vision of Improving Employability Everyday, something I always have in mind when playing the architect for these courses. Now, onto our upcoming courses:

Access 2016

This course is going to be the fifth and final course on Office 2016 and will cover the material needed for the MOS (Microsoft Office Specialist) exam for Microsoft Access, exam 77-730. This exam, and the course, has five main topics: Creating and managing databases, building tables, creating queries, creating forms, and creating reports. We cover all of that material. However, having helped companies large and small build Access databases for the better part of 15 years, this much I know: One has to have a good handle on the concept of relational database design and on how to go about proper planning for a database in order to be successful with Access. So even though those two topics are not on the exam, we cover those as well.

Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming

What does a bowling ball have to do with programming? Well, to find out, you will want to take our upcoming Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming course. Seriously, though, many people think, or are told, that the first step in learning programming is to learn code. As this course will detail, learning code comes after we learn about objects and their characteristics, designing programs, and designing program workflow. The code, then, is just the result of the plan and then becomes easier to learn. This is also the first course in our new programming tracks of courses, something this space will detail more of very soon.

MTA Security Fundamentals

Over the last year, Microsoft has made strides in updating their MTA (Microsoft Technology Associate) certification program. The MTA program is a great entry-level certification program in the areas of development, databases, and IT infrastructure. Microsoft has “refreshed” the 98-349 exam for Operating System Fundamentals, which I detailed recently, to remove Windows 7-only content and add Windows 10 content. That course will be out sometime this spring.

Another course that has gotten a “refresh” in objectives is the Security Fundamentals course for the 98-367 exam. The core topics of understanding security layers, operating system security, understanding network security, and understanding security software are still there, but they have been updated to reflect the current trends in basic security fundamentals. So, we are doing the same with this course.

Each of these courses will have the usual video training, along with pre-assessments and post-assessments, practice labs, and many helpful test tips (for the Access 2016 and MTA Security Fundamentals courses).

So, with improving employability prospects and certification prospects in three areas: databases, programming, and security, hey, maybe January isn’t such a bad month after all, even without the golf.

MTA HTML5 Application Development Fundamentals Released!

Today, we are excited to announce the release of our MTA HTML5 Application Development Fundamentals (98-375) course.

MTA HTML5 Application Development Fundamentals (98-375)

The MTA HTML5 Application Development Fundamentals course gives students a strong introduction to HTML5, which consists of three major areas: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS3), and JavaScript. In addition, this course covers the application life cycle, which is important for web developers to know in order to best plan, design, code, test, validate, and deploy HTML5 apps. This course prepares students for the MTA 98-375 exam.

What We Do? Improving Employability Everyday

improving Employability Every Day

Greetings 2017!

As we start the new year it’s a great time to remind our learners, students, teachers, and career counselors about the two (2) key ingredients that ensure we focus on our “what we do”: Improving Employability Everyday.

At LearnKey we believe that our passion around “what we do” and our “descriptive behaviors” is what drives our culture.

Every team member in our company knows that our “What we do” is aligned to these three words: Improving Employability Everyday. We started redefining our true purpose as an organization through Simon Sinek’s The Golden Circle, over three years ago and truly believe it is the fabric, along with our descriptive behaviors, that drive our culture.

We are so fanatical about this belief that any new employee team members (i.e. welcome most recently: Neil Olsen and Nina Sepulveda) must know that they must possess these key behaviors and understand “The Golden Circle” BEFORE they are even hired. Because the moment they start, that accountability to our customers and team members begin.

My goal is to meet with every team member throughout the year and remind and reinforce my commitment to them and that I will be held most accountable to those behaviors. Therefore, it is good to once again share these with you and the entire world:

Our “Why, How and What”:

“Why”: Dreams fulfilled through better learning.

“How”: Personalized learning solutions that teach job readiness skills, leverage your natural talents, and are aligned to in-demand careers.

“What”: Improving Employability Everyday.

Our seven (7) fundamentals that describe our employee culture:

Be a fanatic about response time. People expect us to respond to their questions and concerns quickly, and rapid response is one of the easiest and best ways to stand out.

Set clear expectations. So there are no misunderstandings, and remember to clarify all the time. This avoids any miscommunications.

Welcome innovation. Creativity in our products and offerings can be produced and packaged differently to meet customers’ needs.

Be a great listener. Understanding expectations and customer needs is the way we want to do business. The best talker is a good listener.

Do your homework. Be prepared for customers, product ideas, referrals, team member support, and the best way to show you’re serious.

Be a problem solver. Solve a problem, fill a need, is how we should do business with customers and in assisting other team members.

Leverage team members. To get things done, meet deadlines, and fulfill customers’ needs. Two heads are better than one.

Welcoming in the new year is a good time for me to give thanks to our team who, day in and day out, commit to themselves, as well as the learners, counselors, and teachers we support that “what we do” is focused on Improving Employability Everyday.

Also, a special thanks to Simon Sinek and the CEO’s of Vistage Group 508 who remind me all the time how important it is to have our message clear and concise.

Best Regards,

Jeff Coruccini

“Improving Employability Everyday”

CEO- LearnKey, INC.