What’s New!

Our New Technical Instructor: Christian Miller

Essentials of Developing Learning Plans

Learning How to Pick Your Battles

Tips of the Month

Upcoming Application Courses

Upcoming Technical Courses

Our New Technical Instructor: Christian Millar

What's New!

Christian Millar joined New Era in September as our full-time Microsoft Infrastructure Technical Instructor. With 14 years experience in the IT industry, Christian has a broad range of industry and teaching experience to offer his students. He has expertise in designing, implementing and maintaining Enterprise, SMB level systems including Server and desktop systems, Small to Enterprise local area networks

Christian presently holds over 20 certifications from Microsoft and Comptia and continually strives to better himself through personal and professional development.

When not tinkering with computers and infrastrure systems, Christian enjoys travelling and experiencing other cultures around the world. Despite living a broad in numerous countries, Christian still calls Canada home.

Christian would love to hear from you! Email him at cmiller@neweratechnology.com to say hi or if you have any questions about our Microsoft Courses!

Essentials of Developing Learning Plans

By: Moe El-Husseini

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?

First, have a plan!

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 aligning goals of the individual, department, and corporation, you can better manage 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 that motivate and encourage the individual on their tasks and skill development.
• Establish a learning evaluation process. For both in-house or external training, make sure you evaluate the outcomes of the training on many levels. Use a full spectrum approach by including employees into the evaluation of training.

Second, build a learning development template for employees!

Aligning performance appraisal with goal setting and learning development will set the stage fo your employees to reach their full potential and grow your organization.

Check out our template to start your process.

Tips of the Month

Learning How to Pick Your Battles

By: Tyler Huggins

Conflict can be a catalyst for great improvements, but it can also cost a lot of time and stress.  When conflict is presented to you, there is usually a window wherein you get to decide whether to get involved or not.  The tendency can be to offer input because we have an opinion, or because the situation gets our emotions involved. Most experts suggest, however, that we assess the situation using specific criteria, before we choose to get involved.  Let’s say you have encountered a difficult person, and you are considering what action you should take.  Ask yourself these questions:

• Is this person important to me personally? 
• Has this happened before, or is this a one-time event? 
• Does this situation bother me personally, or does it bother other people, and they have asked me to get involved? 
• Can I invest the time to deal with this? 
• Do I have the ability, in my position, to affect a positive outcome? 
• Is dealing with this situation pertinent to my role?

If you answer “no” to any of these questions, it is likely best that you just remove yourself from the situation.

• Why spend emotions and time dealing with a situation, if the person is not important to you?
• Why invest effort in solving a problem that may be a “one-of” situation, and not have long-lasting effects?
• Why expose yourself to what could be a potentially unpleasant situation that could have a negative impact on you, if the situation most affects other people who should have a higher interest in trying to come up with a good outcome?
• If you don’t have the time to properly deal with a difficult situation, it is likely best to postpone dealing with it. Rushed handling of a situation may result in an unsatisfactory resolution for one or both of you, and more “side-effects” that have to be dealt with down the road – thus costing you more time and effort in the long run.
• If you lack either the skill or the authority to deal with the situation, a better resolution is likely to come from letting someone else handle it.
• If the situation, or dealing with the situation is not relevant to your role, once again, your time may be better spent elsewhere, and someone else may be better equipped to come up with a solution.

It’s easy to let impulse guide our decision to get involved in a conflict, but taking a moment to reason on the situation, and put any emotions aside can have a great impact on the resolution of the conflict.

Microsoft Office

By: Alex Siedule

For Word 2007 or 2003:

If you are wanting to navigate quickly from one page to the next, try pressing Ctrl+Page Up or Page Down and you will find the cursor jumps one page at a time through your document.

Adobe Illustrator

By: Jane Pratico

Photoshop: Blending Options
If you right click on a layer in the layers toolbar, and then click blending options this will bring you to a whole vast array of effects that will keep you busy for hours. Use these options very sparingly.

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