LearnKey Blog
Cool under pressure – That’s Tayce
Every month I get to brag about one of our team members at Better Learning Systems. Our newest employee of the month is known for leading multiple projects, always being clear and concise with his communications, and demonstrating the unique ability to maintain composure each and every day. That’s right, LearKey’s version of “cool hand Luke” goes to Tayce Robinson!
Not only has he demonstrated his core values, he has done it taking on a new lead role earlier this year as well. Here is what his Senior Lead Brittni Traynor had to say:
“I have been able to work closely with Tayce for over a year now and firmly believe he is the embodiment of the LearnKey core values- Ease, Trust, and Value. While working here, he has been perusing a master’s degree, and has had his share of communal and other professional obligations, but you would never know he is being pulled in so many different directions. He is always willing to take on new challenges and meet increasingly tighter deadlines. He is the Senior Writer of the Writing Team and he leads his team to success on a daily basis. He has the patience of a saint. It doesn’t matter the situation or the amount of pressure, he simply nods his head, shrugs his shoulders, and gets the project done. It is for these reasons, among a long list of others, that he exemplary team player in the Cedar City office. I am not sure what we would do without him”.
LearnKey’s Gregg Akin – always doing his job!
Some of the greatest leaders in the world use the same phrase to describe what they need their team members to do, which is to “just do your job and trust that your other teammates will do theirs”. You hear it time and time again, just watch a Patriots game and you will see their head coach Bill Belichick screaming that phrase to each sub team (i.e. offense, defense, special teams) when they are on the sidelines. Sounds so simple, however, staying focused and reassuring each team member that if they “just do their job” and trust their teammate to do their job too – they will win.
When you have high performing teams, TRUST is the key ingredient to success, which is why it is one of or core values. LearnKey’s Gregg Akin, who is our newest employee of the month, is a perfect example of someone who comes in and does his job, day in and day out. That is why his manager Scott Walker nominated Gregg and had these comments to say about him:
“Gregg has demonstrated our Core values in many ways. He has brought Value to Learnkey by providing a great work ethic, following up with clients that could have easily been lost. He has taken a huge load off of Client Services, by importing thousands of students in the past several months, training teachers and helping them with the ease of OnlineExpert. You can trust him to follow through with any tasks until they are finished – he gets results. He understands the importance and value of our clients. He is very Easy to receive instructions and complete tasks assigned to him, then goes the extra mile to accomplish them to get results.
Gregg is a great asset to LearnKey, and his dedication and hard work show his team members not only is he doing his job, but he is trusting that his other team members will do their job (i.e. selling, creating and producing great video based training).
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Spring Training offer – 30% off courseware!
Spring Training isn’t just for athletes – it can be for training your brain, too! From now until the end of April, visit LearnKey.com, select from our many certification and personal development courses, and use coupon code SPRING2013 in the shopping cart to receive 30% off your purchase!
Choose from some of our top titles:
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• A+ Certification 2012 • Network+ Certification 2012 • IC³ GS4 |
• Photoshop CS6 • Word 2010 • Excel 2010 |
Offer expires 4/30/2013. Applies to single-user courseware only, excludes MasterExams and books.
eLearningPlanner.com – Try our new career and leadership tool
We recently released a free tool for job seekers: elearningplanner.com – a leadership trait and career pathway assessment that identifies your specific leadership talents and recommends career paths based on your answers to a short (about 2 minutes) survey.
We couldn’t just leave it at that though – we LearnKeyed it up a notch by matching eLearning bundles with your selected career paths, and to top it all off, every user receives a free Career Readiness 101 course at the end! So not only do you have a prescribed eLearning plan to become career-ready for your chosen path, but we give you some free Microsoft Office basics to get you started!
To give you an idea of what kind of results you can get from the assessment, I decided to be the test subject and go through it myself and post my results.
My Leadership Talent: Patience
With the leading talent as patience, you will naturally be a dependable, persistent leader. You will be most efficient in leadership when you can manage to a process or system. You value making a difference for others and therefore naturally earn respect and create harmony in a group or team. Naturally, you will like support and serve your team, allowing them to have the praise and recognition for their accomplishments. You will do well when you have clearly defined deadlines for meeting team goals and objectives.
My Recommended Career Paths
Finance & Accounting Professional
Administrative Professional
Graphic Design Professional
Now for accuracy: notice how “Graphic Design Professional” is on my list of recommended career paths? While I manage LearnKey’s online marketing and social media, my strengths lean toward graphic design and layout. As for my leadership style – a structured, clearly defined environment has always been where I thrive the most. Scheduling projects all willy-nilly throws off my workflow and I’m nowhere near as productive as I could be. My results show exactly that!
If you’re interested in finding out what your ideal career paths and leadership talents are, be sure to visit elearningplanner.com and take the survey for yourself. Be sure to sign up for the free Career Readiness 101 course at the end!
Team player exudes talent and “can do” attitude
Team player exudes talent, builds trust and makes cool courses!
One of the most enjoyable parts of my job is sharing to the world what great people we have as part of the Better Learning Systems/LearnKey family. What is even better is when newbies join the team and spread their positive energy making an immediate impact and generating positive results.
That could not be more evident than when Marian Eckley joined our Salt Lake City production team last October. From the day she started it’s been a “breath of fresh air” for the entire team. For someone who is new to a team and to build trust with the existing team members so fast is amazing. In the beginning it was not easy the transition happened fast and the team was required to not miss a beat as we were beginning full production of our Adobe CS6 rollout. What did Marian do? Not only did she “dig” in and learn what we were doing, but she also drove higher expectations and confidence to a group that welcomed it.
Here’s what her manager Liz McEuen had to say during Marians nomination:
“I have had the opportunity to work side-by-side with Marian for the last several months and she naturally embodies our core values of trust, ease and value. Anyone who works with Marian knows they can trust her to finish a project on time and with a production value. When you are working in video production problems and questions may come up but not to worry. She will solve the problem with ease and a clear understanding of what needs to happen to achieve the result we are looking for”.
We are so proud of Marian’s success as she has made several changes to our editing process and these changes have lead to a better product in a shorter amount of time making her extremely valuable to the company.
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Employee Appreciation Day
Even though this post is a little late, I wanted give everyone a peek into our Employee Appreciation Day festivities. I want to start off by thanking everyone at LearnKey for all that they do, to create fantastic training and experience for our customers. We couldn’t do it without you, so once again THANK YOU! Due to our busy production and work schedules each office celebrated on different days. Technically that would mean that we celebrated Employee Appreciation Month right?
Each office celebrated in their own way by providing lunch for their employees, along with other activities.
In the corporate office located in St. George, Utah they treated their “ROCK STAR” employees to deli sandwiches served with fruit, veggies, chips, and cookies. Each employee wore their rock concert T-shirts, and throughout the day employees had the opportunity to answer questions about LearnKey and Rock music with the opportunity to win $10.00 gift certificates to local lunch spots.
The production office in Cedar City, Utah celebrated with BBQ pulled pork sandwiches with mac and cheese. During lunch employees participated in LearnKey Quote Book Jeopardy and employee based crossword and word search puzzles. Winners of these activities received certificates for double scoop ice cream cones and cash. Cedar employees enjoyed having a break and spending time bonding over the LearnKey quote book sayings.
In behalf of all LearnKey employees I want to thank the management team for showing their appreciation and recognizing all of the top notch employees that work at LearnKey. I know that everyone appreciates not only the free lunch, but everything that you do for each of us.
Have a question about LearnKey training or support? I bet KJ has the answer!
At Better Learning Systems, while supporting hundreds of thousands of users, we get a lot of questions about training: how to use our learning systems, technical support, how to deliver our courses to third world countries with no internet… the list goes on and on. It really makes you appreciate those employees who spend the time to have the product knowledge and experience to answer those questions. One person who prides himself in helping people is Kevin Jacobsen our February employee of the month. It’s the one thing we can get right each and every time we interact with our customers when they ask for our help. Kevin truly takes pride in being professional, knowledgeable, respectful and courteous at all times.
Kevin’s leadership team had this to say about his nomination and selection:
“Over the past two months Kevin has demonstrated our core values in several ways. Providing great value by putting in additional hours, supporting customers’ inquires over the phones, in addition to assisting employees with technical needs internally. He is considered a Trusted resource as he will always follow through with what he is given. He has transitioned into a new role and made it easy for all parties who interact with him regarding technical support.
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Sharing the Love
Valentines Day is the day when you show appreciation to those who are important to you. Even though we don’t have flowers or chocolates to give out to everyone, we want to share the love by offering letting you in on a special Valentines offer. We are offering 10% off any single-user LearnKey course. Use the coupon code VDAY2013 receive your discount. This offer ends on February 28, so don’t delay!
LearnKey provides Know Your Talents course to Middle School students and staff
You know those times when you are a part of something good and it makes you feel proud to be a part of it? Today is one of those days. LearnKey announced that we will be offering our Know Your Talents course ($50 value) free to Middle School students, teachers, and counselors. How awesome is that? This course will help students understand their talents and behaviors, while teachers and counselors will learn how to maximize a students learning and enjoyment by understanding behavior.
You are probably wondering why we are doing this.
Did you know that more than 500,000 children drop out of high school each year? When I see this number I think about all of the opportunities, experience, and growth these children will miss out on as a result of their choice. Recent studies show that proactive measures can be taken during middle school years that can dramatically decrease the likelihood of a student dropping out during high school. We see it as our responsibility to do something about the problem.
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There is no “I” in LearnKey or Team!
As we move into February, it’s time again for me to celebrate another employee accomplishment. This has to do with one of our Salt Lake City team members who has demonstrated not only the importance of being a team player, but one who does it on a consistent basis. Since LearnKey is dependent on everyone working together as a team, it means there is no “I” in LearnKey or team! It gives me great pleasure to welcome Rob McNeil as a Better Learning Systems/LearnKey employee of the month. You see Rob is someone who comes to work everyday, on time with the mentality of “do what needs to get done” and how refreshing it is for us to have such a steady employee. His peers VALUE his contributions as he has clearly earned their TRUST and his work effort makes it EASY for everyone.
His manager had this to say during his nomination:
“When you are working in the trenches you want someone who you can trust to get the job done. Rob McNeil is that person! Rob not only get his work done but he embodies the core value of ease. He is happy to take on a project and will see it through to completion. I value the skill set Rob brings to both the table and the trenches! He is a major asset to our studio and I am so thrilled that he is on my team.”
It has not always been easy in our Salt Lake City office. In order to get better at producing courses we had to bring on new team members, and never once did Rob question our decisions to do so. What he did do was welcome these new team members with open arms and a “can do” attitude. We are so fortunate to have Rob on our team.