Veteran Certification on Veterans Day

Showing support at the 2011 St. George Veteran’s Day Parade

LearnKey has been working with the VA VR&E (Vocational Rehab and Employment) program for the last year. The VR&E program is specifically for those veterans who have partial service related disability and the goal is to help the veteran find suitable employment and careers. We offer a number of courses and bundled program packages for the veterans which range from Web design, Graphic design, Cisco Pro, Video production, SharePoint, Office 2010, QuickBooks, CompTIA, Project Management, Database design, Windows Server, etc. We even help the veterans to find jobs with employers where they will truly fit in with the company culture.

I wanted you to know that just yesterday, we had one of the veterans we work with certify in CPEH (Certified Professional Ethical Hacker)! Chris L. has been studying using his LearnKey program that was provided by the VR&E program at the VA. He has been working hard and that work is certainly paying off. He is the first veteran in our program to attempt the CPEH and he will soon take the CPTE (Certified Pen. Testing Engineer) exam. Great job and good timing Chris, you managed to get that certification just in time for Veterans Day!

Happy 11/11/11 – The Last Binary Day

Happy Binary Day. Today is the last Binary Day for the next 89 years! Now you might ask, “What makes a binary day?” Well binary consists solely of the numbers ‘0 and 1’. When a date is made up of only 1’s and 0’s then that is considered a binary day. There are only 9 binary days that occur in a binary year, and only 4 binary years in a century. We have had 36 binary days since 01/01/00 in the year 2000, but the thing that is crazy is that we won’t have another until January 1, 2100. So to all you machine language programmers out there, Happy Binary Day!

To see a full list binary days in the years 2010 and 2011, visit ExploringBinary.com

Word 2010 Certification Journey Continues

So I am still working toward my certification and have found time to finish up with session 1 of our Word 2010 training. I took the post test for session 1, and apparently I need a review. I didn’t do so well on it, but the great thing is that you get to print out a study guide that shows you the questions that you missed, and you can see what sections the questions are in so that you can go back to those spots and review the material.

After I picked my ego up off the floor, I started watching the training for session 2. The topics covered in this session are: Working with Templates, Formatting Text, Formatting Paragraphs, Organizing Data, Bulleted and Numbered Lists, Manipulating Page Layout, Manipulating Page Backgrounds, and Headers and Footers. I found a lot of information in this session very helpful, but one feature stuck out to me and alone is worth upgrading to Office 2010; it is called Autotext and it lets you save text you use regularly under the Quickparts section, then when you need it you can just insert it into any Word document. This is a great time saver, and when I am writing press releases this would be so nice to have for the About Us section.

Again, this session provides you with material that will be on the certification exam, but also gives you some great shortcuts that you can start using right away.

A Painless, Paperless Conversion.

I found myself frustrated one day at the amount of paper, notebooks and files that I had lying around. As a hopeless workaholic, I felt the need to constantly carry many of these documents and files with me for the slight chance I may be able to work on them at home or wherever I ended up that night or weekend. That often left me with a fully packed backpack which was very heavy, or overflowing binders of notes, flyers and documents. People often commented about my overflowing binder. I often commented at what a pain it was to carry around, and how carrying it could replace a gym workout each day. I always reveled in the days I could clean out those files and consolidate my paper documents. It was great once in a while to look organized. That never lasted long with paper documents piling up daily.

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Dallas Trip – Big Hats and Big Hearts

Dallas is one amazing place! I have fallen in love with Texas and had the pleasure of working with amazing people again this last week.

Monday – Airport Re-Route

I had an exciting start Monday night with only 30 minutes left until our arrival in Dallas-Ft. Worth; we received an announcement from the pilot that the airport had been closed due to bad weather! WHAT? Well we quickly stopped for gas in Wichita Falls and finally arrived in Ft. Worth around 12:40 AM, only to wait in line to allow all planes to drop off passengers all at the same time. I finally deplaned around 1:40 AM and then made a mad dash to the Rental Car center…

I have a picture of LEO the Lizard on the dash of my rental car at 2:05 AM in a line of about 15 cars trying to leave the airport rental check out.

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With Our Talents Combined…

LearnKey has talent; TONS of talent. As one of the senior designers for the Cedar City branch office, I get to work with seven other designers directly (each of which has his/her own brand of super power so to speak). If we aren’t collaborating, then we aren’t working. Until recently, the Cedar City branch really hasn’t had too much interaction with our corporate office in terms of working with the awesome group of designers in the marketing department. Our new CEO, Jeff Coruccini, approached me about a two months ago and asked that I work with Trevor Hinton to design and a develop a website for the company.

Web design is my forte and I bleed CSS, so I jumped at this opportunity. Jeff asked that the site be built on a WordPress back end. This was going to be a learning experience for me as I have never designed for WordPress. Luckily for me, Trevor is a WordPress guru. Once I completed the design and had coded the site in HTML and CSS, I packed up my trusty iMac and headed down to the St. George office.

Working with Trevor was a great experience. We were able to bounce ideas off each other, learn new tricks and techniques, and build a relationship between the two different design teams. Now that we know that there is an even deeper pool of talent in the LearnKey family, we are now enabled to take our products to the next level. LearnKey is not just satisfied in training clients, but they want their employees to learn and grow as well. I’m looking forward to working more closely with our marketing team, because I know together we can make something amazing!

Keys to our Success: Great Employees Demonstrating Ease, Value and Trust

As we continue grow, gain success, and reach new heights as a company, it is important that we recognize our most valuable assets: the employees who help us achieve greatness by demonstrating what we stand for through our core values of Ease, Value, and Trust.

Which is why we want to provide a work environment that fosters ease for our employees to get their job done, as well as feel valued for the work they do, and in return the bond of trust is a never ending building process between all of us and our customers. These core values live with us first, becoming the fabric of our company and ultimately are passed along to our valued customers.

Over the past two months I have been extremely proud of the people we have working at LearnKey, and it has been a great experience, which is why my first blog was all about the talent on our team. The key ingredient to any successful company starts with the people. Now its time to start sharing with everyone the successes of our employees each month.

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ACTE 2011

Well, it’s that time of year again. No, I am not talking about the Holiday Season, I am talking about the Annual ACTE Conference. This year’s conference is taking place in St. Louis, MO November 17-19, 2011. It might seem like we are early writing this blog post, but we started planning for this show a couple of months ago and I am starting to get really excited about it. We have exhibited at this trade show in the past and it is always a fun and rewarding event to attend.

If you have never heard of ACTE before, it is the Association for Career and Technical Education. They hold an annual convention every year that draws over 4,000 educators and over 200 exhibitors. The highlight of the conference will be that Sir Ken Robinson will be speaking, if you have not heard him you should check him out on his website. This animated video created from one of his speeches is a particular favorite of ours.

If you are going to attend this years ACTE conference, be sure to come see LearnKey at booth 428!

Cisco Certified Network Professional

Within the Internet technology industry, certification is becoming more and more of a necessity. It has become the validation method for many employers that verifies you have the knowledge and skills they require to get the job done. Hence attaining certification in addition to education and experience is paramount if your goal is a career.

Consider also that when it comes to networking Cisco is the dominant force in the industry. If you work in almost any IT capacity, you will come across Cisco equipment, and you will be required to configure and maintain said equipment. To this end, Cisco has created a series of certifications that once attained will help you communicate to employers and colleges your level of knowledge and skill.

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