What’s New!

The ABC's of Learning Plan Development

MS Office 2003/2007 Skills Builder Program

How to Get Motivated

Tips of the Month

Upcoming Application Courses

Upcoming Technical Courses

The ABC's of Learning Plan Development

What's New!

When organizations invest in its people, it is truly investing in its own future. Ensuring that your people possess the necessary knowledge and skills to perform their jobs is critical to achieving the organization’s strategic goals.

But how do you do that? Do you increase your training budget and register people in as many courses as they request?
Well, today, most organizations adopt a “first come first serve” approach to training. Those employees who are eager to develop their interpersonal and technical skills are the first to ask for the required training. Those who are not as proactive just miss their chance and the training budget doesn’t last long!
However, there are better ways to plan, manage, and measure your corporate training function. Here are some best practices:

• Ensure your HR department has a performance assessment and development program in place. The program would aim at measuring past performance, work on developing strengths as well as reducing weaknesses. By having such a program in place, individual, departmental, and corporate goals are better aligned. This program provides the opportunity for each employee to reflect on his/her own performance as well as plan future goals. This partnership increases the chances of managing employee expectations and eventually unleashing their full potential.
• Connect a learning plan for each individual into the performance assessment and development program. The learning plan would help set achievable and meaningful learning goals. This means each individual gets the opportunity to complete appropriate learning activities. Not only that, but the learning activities are tied to the organization’s values and strategic goals.
• Establish a learning evaluation process. For both in-house or external training, make sure you evaluate the outcomes of the training on many levels. What is the level of satisfaction of the employee out of the training? Was the training worthwhile? Did the training achieve the expected learning outcomes? Is the employee able to transfer the learning into his or her job? These are all important questions to ask even when the course is provided by external training providers and will certainly help with your future decisions in this regards.

In our next newsletter October Issue we are going to share with you templates for annual goals and learning plans.

MS Office 2003/2007 Skills Builder Program

Today, MS Office skills are necessary to function in any organization and in any position.

Whether you need to improve your skills to become better at your job or to advance to another position, our MS Office Skills Builder Program will help you build a development plan to reach your goals for one low price.

Choose from:

Plans:
Four Course Builder – This plan is for clients who need to only develop a few skills in MS Office or need a course refresher. Choose any four courses and levels from the MS Office list to customize your learning plan.
Price: $595 – Save over 50% off our regular course prices!*
Six Course Builder – This plan is for clients who need a few more courses to reach their learning goal. Choose any six courses and levels from the list to customize your learning plan.
Price: $895 – Save over 50% off our regular course prices!*

Check out the www.neweratechnology.com/skillsbuilder

To learn more about this program or our other services, please contact us at:

*Some restrictions apply.

Tips of the Month

How to Get Motivated

By: Tyler Huggins

“Multi-tasking”.  In theory it sounds like a great ability to have, and really, a necessary skill for all the demands put on us in the business world today.  But there is a huge cost to multi-tasking. Gerald Weinberg, in “Quality Software Management, Systems Thinking”, estimates that context-switching among three tasks costs you 40 percent in lost time.  That loss comes from several factors: we have to put other stuff away; get out what we need; organize papers and files; duplicate efforts reworking or fixing things because we interrupted our thought flow on what we were doing before, etc, etc.  Plus, we’ll likely add a dose of frustration and stress to all of that, which makes us less effective at what we are working on.   Now, that 40 percent stat will vary – obviously, the more involved a project is, the more time we lose when switching. 

Think about golf.  One of the worst mistakes you can make, is to take your eyes off the ball too quickly.  If you lose your focus, and look elsewhere nanoseconds too soon, hitting the ball just millimetres off of the sweet spot on your club face, your results will suffer in a big way.  When you split your focus, your projects will suffer. When you really need to get something done, or accomplish an important or difficult goal, remove yourself from any distractions and dedicate yourself to what you need to do.  You’ll have better results, less frustration, and more time available in the long run.

Microsoft Office

By: Alex Siedule

In Excel:

If you ever find a situation where the # appears, it often means that a column is too narrow to fit the numbers entered into that particular column.

In order to fix this, place the mouse pointer on the right edge of the column that is too narrow and dbl-click the mouse. The column will automatically widen to fit the widest value.

Adobe Illustrator

By: Jane Pratico

Skip the New Document Dialog Box 
To create a new InDesign document without summoning the New Document Dialog Box, add the Opt/Alt key to the Cmd/Ctrl-N keyboard shortcut. The resulting new document will be based on whatever setting you last chose in the New Document dialog box’s Document Preset pop-up menu.

Have questions after class? Email our instructors at helpdesk@neweratechnology.com.

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