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.

Information Technology Specialist Certification by Certiport- Will be a winner

It is so important for students and adult learners to be able to validate their Digital Literacy/fluency and IT skills these days. Today we hear allot about the skills gap or “middle skills” gap. It is real and we see it everyday in our business.

That is why our workforce learning solutions align to addressing the training, practice and certifications necessary to be successful. These are the skills (IT and Customer Service) needed in todays workforce.

According to the National Skills Coalition, while middle-skill jobs make up the majority of the U.S. labor market, just 43% of workers are currently trained to the middle-skill level.

Recently our partners at Certiport launched the Information Technology Specialist Certification and it is going to be a winner. So much in that we are releasing as set of courses that map to these certifications.

The fact that students and learners can certify their skills in the areas of: software development, database administration, networking and security, mobility and device management, and coding is a great start to preparing your career pathway.

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.

LearnKey validates AI & Micro-Pathways in top 10 online education trends

As we welcome in 2021, it’s exciting to see how online education is evolving and the impact it will have in the future.

At LearnKey we were thrilled to see key solutions initiatives we have in place hit Guide2Research’s top 10 online education trends for 20/21. This further validates the “what and why” behind how important these initiatives are and the impact they can have for generations to come.

This first one, #4 AI provides Personalized Learning Pathways. We have been working with our Know Your Talents division leveraging the PDP Global behavioral assessment so when a student completes the assessment/survey, they receive a list of career micro-pathways, which feature LearnKey certification courses, and recommendations to those pathways that match their behavior for the best fit. Why we did this is so our students could have at their finger tips great career exploration information.

The second one, #6 Video-based learning expands to maximize the impact of mobile learning. LearnKey has been doing multimedia courseware that features video-based learning for over 30 years. We have now implemented better learning management technology to ensure our students have the best learning experience on any device.

We are off to a great start for 2021 and have also rolled out a new website, so be sure to visit www.learnkey.com and learn more about new services and offerings.

Key Contributor Award Winner: Making it right for our students

We had a great company all hands video conference call yesterday. Just so nice to see everyone, celebrate some of our successes YTD, welcome new team members and announce our 3rd Quarter Key Contributor Award Winner. Just like our previous KCA winner, this person is someone truly having a positive impact on our students.

When we talk about our “Why” Improving employability every day and our core values Ease, Value and Trust this individual is someone all of us have become to respect and appreciate the great work she does helping our students to ensure they are qualified and ready to onboard into our IT Certification Pathways programs. She is very respectful and easy to get along with, has brought tremendous value as an individual and team contributor and someone who has earned the trust of everyone she works with at LearnKey as well as the counselors we serve.

Which is why it gives me great honor to announce that Jade Brown was the recipient of our Key Contributor Award winner this quarter.

Over the last year and a half Jade has implemented, streamlined and improved our enrollment process by developing a vetting process to ensure our students are qualified to be in our program. In addition she is directly responsible from growing this role into a team. Her hard work has directly correlated to having more successful & motivated students/learners better qualified to start are programs. Jade is the type of team players that has a great attitude and ” will do whatever it takes to get the job done” .

Organizationally, Jade took the lead and wrote training manuals and SOP’s for new LK team members so they can successfully onboard in the enrollment department. Her leader, Kelly had this to say “We have great LK team members but man I believe Jade is one of the hardest workers we have” Couple that with her professionalism and courtesy we congratulate you Jade on this great accomplishment.

We all know this has been a challenging year and it’s so exciting to know that we can have some peace of mind in knowing we are making a difference in people’s lives during these times.

Whether its knowing that we helped over forty-six (46) of our students get hired, or helping a student get certified, offering free employability skills training for those unemployed, or assisting the counselors and teachers that are dealing with allot of stress and challenges, yes we have those challenges too, however, they way our team has come together to handle these situations makes me truly proud of each and everyone one of our team members. Our Senior Instructor also had us excited about the current course (IT fundamentals) he and the production team are working on, listening to his passion really made all of us appreciate the hard work that goes into producing courses like this one.

Staying connected during these times is important and we will continue to do that. Today was nice and tomorrow will be better.

Calling all unemployed Arizona & Utah Residents: Free Employability Courses

When I was growing up it was always about “do the right thing,” not only personally but professionally. With so much unemployment at a rapid pace, LearnKey, since March of this year, has been focused on doing the right thing, in the best way that we can. For us it’s about providing access to our courses. Earlier this year we had the opportunity to do that for two thousand schools by way of extending our courses to schools, students, and teachers in need.

In today’s world, that can be considered Corporate Social Responsibility. My understanding is corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a type of business self-regulation with the aim of being socially accountable. I have read there is no one “right” way companies can practice CSR; many corporate CSR initiatives strive to positively contribute to the public, the economy, or the environment.

Our newest initiative is focused both on the environment and economy, something we are very proud of, in that we are offering free online employability courses for those residents in Arizona & Utah, both states where we have headquarter locations. It is our way of helping those in need so they can gain key employability skills, and so far it has been well received.

Just last week LearnKey was in the news on Arizona News Channel 3 sharing this free offer and you can read more about it here, including how to get access to these free online courses. We want to continue to spread the news about this free offer to those in need of learning interview tips, advice on how to find jobs online, and improving their communication skills so they can stand out among the competition.

In June of this year, I shared with our employees that my goal was to focus on what I can control: Love my family & friends, be the best leader I can be for LearnKey, and make sure that we as a team respect one another each and every day. What pleases me most is to see our teams taking pride in doing what we can do to help and stay positive in these challenging times.

LearnKey’s newest Key Contributor Award Winner: Did you know?

One of the biggest challenges each quarter for our leadership team is to select a team or team member to be our Key Contributor Award winner(s). That is the most wonderful problem to have as this award is about going above and beyond “what was expected of you.” We had so many fantastic nominations this past month that it really made the decision-making process tough. Which just shows we have such a great culture; everyone is always working harder to be better. Or as we say “Improving Employability Every Day.”

Speaking of employability, please join me in congratulating Jeff Martin as our newest Key Contributor Award winner and a key member of our employability team. What we learned about Jeff’s accomplishments was simply amazing. His leader, Beth Ciaramello, did a real fun “Did you know” on his nomination.

Did you know?
Jeff has contacted over one thousand (1000) students in the last 1.5 years. He has taken on additional roles (i.e. student services, workforce readiness coach) with a complete “can do” attitude. He has reviewed four hundred (400)+ resumes in 2020, has successfully placed over twenty five (25) students YTD, on-boarded a new team member, and constantly receives exceptional ratings from students on how good it is to work with him. Additionally, he fully owned the Employability Team’s assembly of our standard operating procedures.

The best part was to see and hear the feedback from everyone in the company supporting and applauding his selection. He works incredibly hard and he impacts all students’ lives and makes LearnKey an incredible place to work.

Strange times, I was able to finally congratulate him in person in a parking lot, North Scottsdale, so we could get a picture of him holding the award. Thank you for all you do Jeff Martin and the entire LearnKey family. We continue to strive to get better and improve employability every day.

Jeff

#LKEVOLUTION

2020-21 Career Pathways Update

Hello, everyone. At the beginning of each year we set internal goals and one of my goals is to set the course order and career pathways we will pursue the coming year. Inevitably, demands and priorities change, and so do exam objectives for courses we plan on filming seemingly right before filming, but I digress.

One adjustment we have had to make is to update career tracks to reflect the ever-evolving Microsoft certification transitions from fundamental certifications to role-based certifications. The theory behind this is that certifications are more valuable when tied to a certain job role rather than just a cursory knowledge of a system. Personally, I think it is a great idea as this allows for those pursuing certifications to better target the areas of expertise they want.

That said, one of the main reasons for this career pathways adjustment, besides the fact that cloud computing is growing rapidly, is that as of January 31, 2021, all fundamental exams are being retired. This includes all exams starting with 70- and all MB- exams (for Microsoft Dynamics) as well.

With that said, allow me to present to you the highlights of all the career pathway changes:

NEW: Cloud Administrator

Exams: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900), Azure Administrator (AZ-104), and Azure Security Engineer (AZ-500)
This is replacing Windows Server 2012 MCSA (exams 70-410, 70-411, and 70-412)
Reason: Microsoft is pushing Azure, its cloud infrastructure, heavily and the adoption rate is picking up speed

UPDATED: Programming

Exams: Oracle Java Associate (1ZO-808), Flutter Certified Application Developer (AFD-200), and Azure Solutions Developer (AZ-204)
These are replacing the soon-to-be-retired Microsoft programming exams (70-480, 70-483, and 70-486)
This is a much “wider” track in that we have one general certification (Java), one for mobile app development (Flutter), and one for cloud (Azure)

NEW: Artificial Intelligence

Exams: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900), Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900), and Designing and Implementing an Azure AI Solution (AI-100)
According to LinkedIn, 133 million jobs will touch AI-enabled automation by 2022

NEW: Database Professional

Exams: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900), Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900), and Designing and Implementing a Data Science Solution on Azure (DP-100)
This is an excellent track for someone looking to become a data analyst

NEW: Advanced Database Professional

Exams: Implementing an Azure Data Solution (DP-200), Designing an Azure Data Solution (DP-201), and Administering Relational Databases on Microsoft Azure (DP-300)
This basically replaces the MCSA for SQL Server

The timeframe for these tracks is from now to about 12 months from now for all of these and, per usual in the IT business, these are subject to change. But this should give you an idea as to how we are evolving our offerings to match with the best possible employability scenarios for you as you pursue your journey.