Karen’s Opinion

A good friend of mine recently lost his job. I was blown away when I heard the news. He was a professor and taught for many years. To be without a job has caught him off guard. Many of us could find ourselves in his position. We live our lives, comfortable in our daily tasks and then whammo, we are without a job. It is not easy to find a well paying job especially when you are only trained in a particular field. We all need to take control of our success. To be prepared, it is important to have up to date training in fields that are hiring.

There is help available for those who are seeking skill improvement for a particular job profile. Learn.com provides online training courses in many fields. They also offer compliance courses that will have you in a skilled profession with the training of which you can rely and able to apply for jobs in that field.

Learn.com makes it easy to learn new job skills that will help you get back into the workforce or help you get a promotion. I was recently asked to review their site and was able to go through the motions of the choosing a course and checking out my skill score. A Skill score is calculated for each job profile based upon the completion and passing of exams for each course that is prepared for a specific job profile. The Skill score gives me, as well as a potential employer, the key to know if I have the qualifications or need training for a profession.

After I registered at their site, I chose from a list of job profiles. There is a whole library of job profiles covering jobs in business, management and administration as well as marketing, sales and service. I chose the business category since that is my field of expertise. I manage a business and wondered how I measured up in their executive secretaries and administrative assistants job profile.

The courses are varied from beginning math and grammar skills, of which I can certainly use a refresher course, to business ethics. Learn.com also offers accredited courses from some very exclusive online degrees from impressive universities. The College Network, George Washington University, Boston University, and eCornell are listed as part of an extensive list of universities with courses offered through Learn.com. There are telephone and written communication courses as well as computer use courses. I am excited to see all these subjects. These are things I have had to learn on my own. What a fabulous resource for those wanting a complete training course that they can do on their own time.

Okay, time to calm down and actually choose a course. I am choosing Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Fundamentals. I am off to do some studying and will be back to tell you how I did.

To be continued….

Okay, I was taken through an easy to use program that taught me everything I needed to know about building a power point presentation. Now I have the confidence to check out the grammar and communication programs.

Everyone needs to refresh their minds or learn new information to keep up with today’s technology. It is important during these economic times when our jobs are not as stable as we once thought. Be prepared by taking control of your circumstances. Learn new things at Learn.com.