It is always a daunting thing to update your resume, right there in a one page format you have to show what you know, who you know, what skills you have and prove why you should get a job over someone else. Talk about a self-esteem blow! Even with a stellar resume you begin to question “have I done enough in my life to make these people want to hire me?” or “what have I been doing for the last 20 years?”. Well if you’re like me, you have the education and job experience areas covered, but you stare at the section about skills and certifications and wonder, “What do I put here?” Certifications, what certifications? It is time to enhance that resume and improve your value to your company or potential company.

That’s right, I’m getting certified and you get to follow me on my journey. You get to hear about the highs and the lows, the aches and pains, the triumphs, and everything in between. Hopefully this will give you insight into the whole process of certifying and maybe provide you with some tips and tricks on how to do it successfully, using our training of course.

The first step is choosing which certification to get. For me I started thinking about all of the things I do here at LearnKey on a daily basis and what training and certification would improve my job performance and increase my value in the workplace. This led me to Word 2010, learning how to function better in Word will hopefully make me a more efficient employee. I use Word multiple times a day whether it is to write and edit press releases or create email messages so it is an important tool to my job. If however you are looking for employment and see the value in adding a certification to your resume it is important to think about what jobs you are seeking and the skills companies hiring in these areas might be looking for and then validate those skills with a certification. So I am off on my journey to certification, feel free to ask me questions or give tips for success. Wish me Luck!

Hopefully by now the recession is working its way behind us, and now many trainers have the task of piecing together training programs that have suffered cuts. Many companies cut training throughout the recession, and now the training department has to figure out what their programs will look like going forward. Now that budgets are bouncing back, it is important to remember the recession moving forward.

It might be an automatic reaction to want to simply move back into the old ways and old habits, but it is important to remember not to. If recessions teach us anything, it’s how to do more with less, so one idea moving forward with your new budgets is to keep costs down and increase your course offerings with video-based training, instead of going back to in-person delivery methods. Many companies made cuts to travel and moved toward video-based training when the recession was at it’s worst, but it is important to consider video-based training moving forward as a more permanent program rather than a temporary fix.

Continue reading “Training After the Recession”