An engaged learning culture means more than just the number of minutes recorded in a learning tool. When employee engagement with workplace learning is strong, they stretch themselves past their comfort zones to learn new skills and overcome obstacles. Teams that eagerly engage with learning drive innovation and build agility in a constantly changing business landscape. For learning leaders faced with limited resources and other constraints, developing an engaging learning program is easier said than done. And, it can often feel like there’s not enough time in the day. But there’s good news: many learning engagement tactics don’t require an enterprise-size team to pull off. Plus, this February, there’s an extra day on the calendar — Leap Day, February 29, a perfect time to take a break from the usual tasks and build a plan to reengage learners. These practical engagement ideas will help you multiply the value of your company’s learning program in manageable ways for learning teams of all sizes. And you can continue to scale these approaches as your company grows. 7 ideas to boost learner engagement Assign courses to employees and teams: It’s a simple solution to a common employee question: “What do I learn first?” By assigning courses relevant to an employee’s career goals or a learning path designed to upskill a team for an upcoming project, you’re helping employees engage with learning quickly and directly. Share top courses within your company: Dig into your learning platform analytics to identify popular courses and share that list with employees. These lists will help answer: “What do I learn next?” Reveal your top three company learners: Make your company’s power learners learning advocates. Whether it’s a call-out in a company meeting or an announcement of the quarter’s most prolific learners in an internal forum, show gratitude for those already engaged in learning. Other employees will take notice of the value placed on learning and follow suit. Host course clubs: Create monthly course clubs to encourage functional teams or employees with similar career goals to learn together. Like a book club, each employee reviews the material independently and then gathers with a group to share what they have learned and gain insights from colleagues. Schedule lunch-and-learns: Empower the learning advocates you recognized in idea #3 by inviting them to host lunch-and-learns on topics of their choosing. Not only does this recognize their learning accomplishments and allow them to share their learnings, but it also offers peer reinforcement of the usefulness of learning. Highlight new courses: An ideal learning platform keeps its content fresh and evolving to reflect industry trends. Regularly share the latest courses and content with your workforce so employees know there’s something new to learn when they log into your learning management system (LMS). Implement company-wide learning time: It’s challenging for employees to make time in their work days for learning, which is why executive support for company-wide learning time is essential. Consider a monthly DEAL Hour — Drop Everything and Learn — where employees are encouraged by their managers and other leaders to take some pre-designated time for learning. Download A Checklist to Boost Learner Engagement to see 10 more learner engagement ideas, and share the list with anyone on your team working on learning programs. Use the extra time on the upcoming Leap Day to select three learning engagement ideas and make a plan to activate them with your company’s learners.
The public cloud market is growing at a staggering rate, as companies of all sizes move their technical architecture away from costly on-site configurations. At the top of this industry is Amazon’s public cloud service, AWS, with $35.4 billion in revenue last year and 38.9% total market share. Its closest competitor, Microsoft’s Azure, saw $19 billion in revenue and 21.1% market share. It’s understandable then that AWS skills are in high demand among companies wanting to scale their backend infrastructure and provide the best possible customer experience. As AWS features change quickly, companies are encouraging employees to prepare for and earn technical certifications in AWS services to keep current with the complexities of cloud computing. Certifications are an optimal way to train and validate employees’ skills in these tools. They can also be a crucial hiring qualification when recruiting candidates for a specific technical need. Since there are 12 available AWS certifications for technical employees to earn, it can be difficult to understand which is right for your company’s needs. We recently spoke with Udemy instructor and AWS expert, Chandra Lingam, about his perspectives on keeping cloud computing knowledge current and the AWS certification that will give your team a strong foundation in the cloud platform. Q: What is a particularly valuable AWS certification? A: I consider the Solutions Architect Associate as the foundational certification for people in the technical track. I like this certification, as it gives learners a breadth of understanding of AWS services and how to integrate them into a complete solution for your company. Q: What does a Solutions Architect do? A: An architect is responsible for translating a company’s business requirements into a solution blueprint. They need to ensure the solution is secure, avoids a single point of failure, and handles changes to traffic flows while being cost-effective. An architect also has to review existing solutions and identify areas for improvement. They don’t simply propose a solution and hand it off to colleagues for implementation. They’re closely involved with most implementation steps of a cloud system and provide guidance to the development team. Consider this example of how the skills of a Solutions Architect might be seen in practical application. Someone recently reached out to me to help lower their company’s AWS hosting cost. The company’s product provided information to manage medical health conditions, and the AWS monthly charges were very high. We analyzed the itemized bill, VPC Flow Log, ELB logs, and type of requests processed by the application. The issue turned out to be an application-level attack by bots to bring down the system. We protected the application by deploying the AWS web application firewall and immediately noticed an improvement in performance and reduced usage of server resources. The customer reached out for assistance on billing and performance issues, but the root cause was a security issue we were able to identify, thanks to the knowledge I have from the Solutions Architect Associate certification. Q: What sort of learner should take your AWS Solutions Architect Associate course? A: In my AWS Certified Solutions Architect course, we walk through several real-world technical scenarios and how to apply cloud architectural principles to them. People will learn how to avoid a single point of failure, properly secure and protect their workload, and design for high availability, among other use cases. I see three types of learners for this course: Learners without prior cloud experience who want to transition to a career in cloud computing. Learners who might have some cloud experience and need a structured introduction to AWS Experienced public cloud users who want to stay up-to-date with the latest changes in AWS. The exam will test learners on 200 to 300 possible scenarios, which is why technical team leaders see certification prep as an important part of their employees’ continued learning. By preparing for these scenarios, learners become versatile AWS Solutions Architects. Q: How do you approach teaching topics like AWS that change so rapidly? A: I prioritize features and capabilities that I feel organizations would value. So, that is my subjective assessment, but I also get feedback from learners requesting specific topics. AWS certification exam questions tend to lag behind any changes in the product by a few months. I use this time to test the new features, understand how companies might use them, and then develop the educational materials to update my courses. As an example of how I might incorporate AWS platform changes into my courses, let’s look at S3, a popular cloud storage service in AWS. A recent change in this product focuses on how object security is managed in S3 when multiple accounts share a bucket — which is a common scenario in an enterprise. S3 now allows the bucket owner to automatically become the owner of all objects stored in the bucket. This enhancement of S3 security vastly simplifies cross-account permissions. This improvement is great for big data analytics and when querying millions of objects, as you are guaranteed to access the most up-to-date data. I also keep an eye on pricing model changes, which are critical for using a cloud provider efficiently. AWS offers Savings Plans that allow companies to purchase fractional compute capacity at a deep discount for long-term use. This fractional purchase model allows an organization to adjust to changing technology needs quickly. Both of the updates I describe here provide great value to a company, so those are lessons I’d be sure to include in a new course or in the regular updates I make to existing courses. Q: What are the major trends you’re seeing in AWS this year? A: As I’ve noted, cloud computing changes quickly, whether a company is using AWS or other popular public cloud vendors like Microsoft’s Azure or Google Cloud. In the world of AWS, two trends are standing out for me: Cloud security emphasis: One simple cloud environment can have thousands of resources and millions of events associated with it. Protecting each cloud instance from constantly evolving security threats is a huge challenge that I’m seeing more learners express interest in. AI-poweredA Deep Dive Into AWS Certifications and the Solutions Architect Exam
