In 2016, Oracle expanded from its flagship database products into the cutting-edge realm of the public cloud. Since then, we’ve seen demand for Oracle training content increase as enterprises increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies. We are proud to support our customers on their journeys to multi-cloud fluency by offering in-depth training and certification on OCI, in addition to other comprehensive learnings on AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba.

Master Practical Skills in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

We’re on a mission to reinvent how people and companies assess, train, and apply skills for a cloud-fluent world to drive real business outcomes. Giving customers access to OCI training content is another step towards fulfilling our commitment to helping companies leverage the incredible power of applying cloud know-how to drive digital transformation across their business. 

Whether you’re considering migrating existing workloads to OCI, aspiring to optimize your hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, or eager to enhance your team’s cloud competency, these newly added courses aim to equip you and your team with a practical understanding of OCI solutions. The best part? This training content is now available to all authorized users with a license or subscription, at no additional cost.

Training on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with Cloud Academy

Choosing Cloud Academy for upskilling, reskilling, and onboarding tech talent in cloud and cloud adjacent areas helps with:

• Increase Multi-Cloud Proficiency: Acquire practical skills across five significant cloud providers: AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, and now Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
• Master cloud skills: identify your teams’ skill gaps and readiness across any major cloud provider. Then build skills through courses, hands-on labs, and customizable learning experiences.
• Assess Real-Time Skill Inventory: Access an instant overview of your team’s skills to fill essential roles in the hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems your business requires.

Get started today with Oracle APEX Foundations. This comprehensive guide is your gateway to mastering Oracle Application Express (APEX), a robust tool for creating data-centric applications. In the coming weeks, even more learning paths, workshops, and courses will be added.

About Oracle University

Oracle University, the learning and training arm of Oracle, is a leader in cloud education, providing modern digital training, certification, and learning solutions across Oracle’s entire product portfolio that enable our customers to master their Oracle Cloud solutions and maximize their investments. Over 2 million certified professionals worldwide have placed their trust Oracle University to reach their learning goals. 

The post Level Up Your Cloud Skills: Oracle Now in Cloud Academy’s Training Library appeared first on Cloud Academy.

As we hear all the time, cloud technology continues to grow rapidly. And as the tech continues to evolve, so do the certifications — many of which need regular refreshers and renewals. Keeping up is a constant battle.

As a team manager, you already understand the importance of upskilling your tech team so they’re up-to-date with these changes. It’s increasingly important for them to gain these industry-recognized certifications that help them to advance in their current role and build a long-term career with you. 

You need to track your team members’ certifications and gain visibility into expiring certifications — but how can you do that effectively? 

If you’re like a lot of team managers, you have a process of uploading PDFs and updating a spreadsheet. Although you might not mind this manual task, you know that this process is archaic, time-consuming, and difficult to track. There has to be a better way. 

There are several certification tracker tools out there that can help ensure that your entire organization is on track with certification requirements. But that’s an extra tool with extra costs and extra work…for you. 

That’s where we come in. Cloud Academy is continually enhancing our platform, adding new features to make it more valuable and to make your job easier. Just a few months ago, we announced new functionality that allows individual team members to upload their certifications and keep them all organized directly in the platform. 

We built upon that functionality to make it seamless for you to have complete visibility into your organization’s certifications, and we’re excited to announce that our new certification dashboard is now available exclusively for enterprise admins, team managers, and stakeholders on the Cloud Academy platform. 

The certification dashboard allows you to effortlessly track your organization’s certifications by providing a bird’s-eye view into the certifications uploaded from the entire team. Not only that, your dashboard highlights expired certifications and certifications expiring in the next 90 days, so you’ll know who needs to work on updating certifications — all without having to update another spreadsheet! Of course, if you still want a spreadsheet, we give you the option to download that directly from the dashboard as well.

Highlights

1. Empower your team to upload their own certifications

We made it easy for your members to upload their professional certifications directly from their dashboard. This keeps their certifications organized, sends them reminders when they are expiring, and gives you a bird’s-eye view into the certifications of your entire organization. 

2. Accelerate certification readiness and keep teams on track

The certification dashboard provides a centralized location to monitor, measure, and track certification-related information within your organization. Plus, it pinpoints expired certifications and those expiring in the next 90 days, so you’ll always know who needs to work on updating certifications — without having to manually update another spreadsheet! 

3. Gain deeper insights to know precisely where your teams stand

Each chart allows you to dive deeper into the data. Simply right-click on any chart element, click “Drill down” or “Show underlying data” to get more granular insights, such as which team or member has a specific certification. Download the entire dashboard as a PDF or export individual charts to provide clarity on the skills your team has to help you plan for scalable, predictable growth. Want to get your hands dirty with all the info? You can download a spreadsheet of everything and start to dig in.

Where can you find it?  

The certification dashboard is located under “Intelligence” in the management dashboard.

Why is it important to track employee certifications? 

Most businesses using Cloud Academy for cloud certification purposes have a concrete goal, such as certifying a specific number of employees. Keeping track of both the earned and expiring certifications is important to ensure that you are accurately meeting your training objectives. 

Additionally, if your organization has certification requirements for working on the network, then tracking expiring certifications is critical to prevent compliance issues. The new certification dashboard will give you peace of mind that all of your team’s certifications are up-to-date and allow you to keep your employees on track with recertification requirements. 

Finally, knowing who has which certifications helps you understand what’s going on with the overall health of your organization. For example, if you consistently see technical errors within certain teams, you can review the certification dashboard to see if the teams making the errors have adequate credentials and training, and adjust the requirements accordingly. This can lead to increased productivity and create a more collaborative atmosphere for everyone in your organization. 

Want to learn more? 

Get started on a company trial to start upskilling your team with real-time certification tracking. You’ll get to test drive the enterprise platform for seven days for free — no credit card required. Or request a demo to see the platform in action. 

The post Certification Tracking: Introducing the Newest Built-In Functionality appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Here’s a recap of what we’ve been up to and how our product has grown since the new year.

For Admins and Managers 

New & Improved Reporting

One of the biggest aspects that sets Cloud Academy apart from the rest is our focus on providing in-depth analytics and insights on the individual, team, and organization level. To make it even easier for you to deep-dive into your team’s technical skills, we’ve updated our reporting functionality with a refreshed UI and new reports for you to leverage. 

The four new reports available include User Skills, which lists each member’s most recent skill score compared to their initial skill score, Learning Path Content and Training Plans Content, which both map the user’s content and current position within the given learning path or Training Plan they’re in, and Certification Report, which tracks the certifications your team has achieved. Not only do these enhancements expand our reporting capabilities, but you gain optimized data aggregation and an enhanced user experience so you can make the greatest impact with the talent on your team. 

Take Bulk Actions in the Management Dashboard

At Cloud Academy, we’re always thinking, “How can we streamline this process for our users?” And sometimes the smallest changes can have some of the greatest impact. Within the Management Dashboard, you can perform bulk actions on all members who match your search criteria, so you can streamline the process of assigning Training Plans, extending due date, and so much more across multiple team members at one. 

Access a Member’s Training Plan Progress 

As individuals conquer more and more new skills, it’s important to be able to reference what training they’ve completed in the past. We’ve made it possible to access each member’s Training Plan history in your account, so you can see all of the member’s active, scheduled, and completed Training Plans and never second-guess yourself when assigning new training. To learn more, view our help center article here.

Member Spotlight View

Take a quick glance at the most important stats for a member at any given time. The new Member Spotlight feature lets enterprise admins, team managers, and stakeholders see a summary of a single member’s skills, usage, teams, and training. To open a member spotlight, just click a member’s photo or name wherever it appears in the application.

For Individual Members 

Bookmarks Tab

If there’s ever an opportunity to help our users become more organized, we take it! Simplify your on-the-go learning experiences by bookmarking important resources, and then easily find them later within the Bookmarks tab on your user dashboard. 

Self Assign Training Plans 

We can all attest to the value of autonomy, which is exactly what we wanted to give our users as they set training goals for themselves. When a learner starts a learning path, a window now appears with an option to set a due date and self-assign the learning path as a Training Plan. This feature gives your team members an easy way to take advantage of the features of a Training Plan—such as built-in accountability to help users 10x their completion rate. 

We hope these recent enhancements help you achieve the best skill-building experience possible. And these are just the start—we have much more planned for the second half of the year. If you ever have questions about our product and want to get in touch, you can always contact us here!

The post A Promising Start to 2021: Our Half-Year Recap appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Whether you’re an individual user of our platform or part of a large enterprise team, we’ve learned that a majority of people using Cloud Academy are quite an ambitious bunch. Many of you are constantly working towards certifications, and often multiple certifications at that! But once you’ve trained for weeks with our step-by-step Training Plans, gotten your hands dirty in the code with our hands-on labs, and finally passed your certification exam, how are you keeping track of all these new achievements?

We’ve heard from many of our customers that you’d like a central place to find all the certificates you’ve collected while working with Cloud Academy, and we’re excited to announce that we’ve built in functionality to upload your certifications and keep them all organized directly in the platform. 

Now you can easily keep track of all the achievements throughout your professional career in one easy-to-reference location when you need to showcase your results. You can also share each certification directly to your LinkedIn profile.

Not only can you upload certifications you’ve achieved from external providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, and more, but it also tracks all of our internal learning path certificates. Whenever you download a certificate for a learning path you complete in Cloud Academy, it will automatically appear in the new “certifications” tab for you, making it easy to reflect back on your progress over time. 

Within your dashboard, you’ll see a “certifications” tab at the top where you can get started.

What’s even better is that from this view, you can also download each of your certifications and easily print them out.

As you plan for your next promotion, set your sights on landing a new job, or simply gain mastery in your craft, we hope you find this tool helpful in staying organized and headed toward success. Get started today with our learning paths and start earning your own certifications.

The post Track Your Certifications, Point to Your Success appeared first on Cloud Academy.

The Cloud Academy training library is full of excellent training materials to help a wide variety of people achieve an even wider variety of career goals. It’s good to have choices, but sometimes having so many choices of what to learn about is overwhelming. Where do you start when all you really know about the career you want is the general-sounding job title you’re working to get? How much time should you spend working toward it? How long will it take?

Which Path to Take

Learning paths bring together courses, hands-on labs, and exams related to the same topic. Training Plans bring together learning paths, let you set deadlines for yourself, and help you schedule your training time. Now we’re introducing a new kind of path to help you answer the questions you’re facing so you can land that dream job or improve in the one you’ve got.

Enter Job Roles 

Job Roles are the new tool that helps you know where to start. With job roles, getting that new position or promotion has never been easier. Job roles help answer your questions and get you started on the right path.

To begin, job roles cover the following positions in modern organizations:

• Cloud Architect
• Data Engineer
• DevOps Engineer
• Machine Learning Engineer
• Software Engineer

Each job role is named after the specific tech career it helps you achieve. Our team of cloud technology experts have hand-selected the most relevant Training Plans to guide you every step of the way. 

Choose Your Adventure 

Job roles appear in the left navigation of the Training library.

When you click the job role you want, you see the Training Plans that we recommend for people who are pursuing this career.

When you click a Training Plan, you get a summary of what you’ll learn, including how long the content is and an estimate of how many days it will take you to complete. If this looks like the Training Plan for you, click Start Training Plan. (If you’re a team manager or admin in an enterprise account, you also see an option here to assign the Training Plan to your team.)

It really is that easy, and before you know it, you’ll be well on your way to accomplishing those career goals, which is what we’re all about.

About Cloud Academy

At Cloud Academy, we deliver innovative, enterprise-ready training technology that enables organizations to constantly improve the way they do business. You can count on Cloud Academy to keep delivering straightforward ways to motivate your team to learn and grow.

If you are new to Cloud Academy and want to learn more, why not check out our website? If you are already on the Cloud Academy path and you have any questions, don’t hesitate to speak with your Customer Success Manager.

The post The Path You Take Depends on Where You Want to Go: Introducing Job Role Paths appeared first on Cloud Academy.

We have 780+ courses and 1,400+ lab steps in the Cloud Academy library, so it can be overwhelming when you first see it. Let me provide you with a few tips to help you navigate and find what you need.

First off, head straight to our Training Library.

The menu on the left helps by enabling you to choose the overall topic, as well as the type of learning asset you prefer.

If you are a beginner and a listener (someone who likes to read or watch), then choose “Cloud Computing Fundamentals” and “Course” as the content type.

 If you are completely overwhelmed by all this Cloud stuff, then I think a good place to start is Simple Explanations to Technical Topics. Then try What is Cloud Computing?

If you are past this and more of a hands-on person (like me), then choose “Cloud Computing Fundamentals” and “Hands-on Labs” as the content type from the menu on the left. Now you will see the labs we have for your topic. 

https://cloudacademy.com/library/cloud-fundamentals/labs/

Go on and try one! If it doesn’t work out and you can’t do it, don’t worry — we do the cleanup, no one will know, and you can try another way to learn from the menu. 

You could also try just doing an assessment. You might know more than you think already. To find one, just click on any Learning Path and choose Quiz or Exam.

Want to know what’s new in certifications and courses in general? We’re constantly adding to and updating our library. Check out our interactive and real-time Content Roadmap:

PRO TIP

Use our killer search functionality to dive way deep into any resource in our platform.  You can even search for specific questions in exams — and get the answers! Think of our Search as your own personal cloud wiki, but with 100% trustworthy contributors.

And if you get stuck, just ping us at support@cloudcademy.com. We are here to help! 

What’re some other good basics?

Try the AWS Technical Essentials Learning Path. This is a carefully planned out learning experience that you take step-by-step. You’ll learn about technical services and concepts that are the building blocks to functioning web applications. These tenets are applicable to ALL clouds, and to IT in general (even on-premises).

You’ll learn about:

• Compute
• Storage
• Networking
• Databases

Need even more hand-holding?

That’s ok! That’s what we’re here for. Our AWS cert experts guide you through really easy-to-understand explanations of the Technical Essentials. Check out our Office Hours webinar where Stephen Cole and Will Meadows break it all down in a really entertaining and clear way.

What will YOU do with the basics?

Get those basics down, then get certified. You’ll have demonstrable proof that you’ve put in the time to reach standardized levels of knowledge and achievement. 

And as you continue in your studies and maybe (just maybe) get a little stuck — reach out to us in our LinkedIn Cloud Academy Community. Our instructors are always hanging out to give you a nudge in the right direction.

Training Tip #006: Get Your Hands Dirty

You have a lot going on and need to find ways to learn more effectively. It’s time to learn by doing. It’s time to apply what you’ve learned where it really counts: in real cloud environments using Cloud Academy labs. When you do this over and over again, you’ll learn what to do in real-life work scenarios and other high-pressure situations — like certification exams.

Cloud Academy Labs Explained

As you may know, we have three very different types of labs: hands-on labs (guided), lab challenges (non-guided), and our newest lab playgrounds (sandboxed). Depending on your technical level, you’ll want to start with the right lab for you.

Hands-on Labs

Hands-on labs are guided experiences to learn in live cloud environments with step-by-step guidance to practice your skills without getting stuck. 

Lab Challenges

Lab challenges are non-guided skill validation to demonstrate problem-solving skills — basically, hands-on labs with the gloves off.

Lab Playgrounds

Lab playgrounds provide a safe and secure sandbox environment for you to explore your own ideas, follow along with Cloud Academy courses, or answer your own questions — all without having to install any software on your local machine. You can feel free to take risks and try unfamiliar tools and commands to learn more about working in a live environment — even if it means running into a dead end and needing to start the lab over.

We’re constantly innovating and creating more content for you. Check out our Content Roadmap Updates for more info on what’s next at Cloud Academy.

Training Tip #005: Mix Up Your Habits

Let’s change some of our study habits a bit. Why not break out of your routine and do something different so you can re-engage those neurons and synapses? We’re here to help you keep learning, and sometimes that means taking a break and trying something new.

Send to PDF

Have you been watching screens for weeks on end? Give your eyes a break — let’s go analog and print something out. 

Whenever you’re in a course, any of the resources with the download symbol ⤓ can be saved as a PDF, so get your markers and start drawing connections and sketching. 

Send to Phone

Don’t want to leave your screen? We get it. 

You can seamlessly and easily continue your studying anywhere. When you’re in one of our learning paths or courses, just click the Send to your phone button to push your content to your phone. You’ll instantly pick up exactly where you were on your computer. (Hint: make sure you have notifications enabled, and you can get the app for Android and iOS.)

Now you can study anywhere. Curl up in a corner. Sit outside. Or pretend to watch a hyperactive child while they dig in dirt and you steal a few moments to yourself.

Bonus: Don’t forget, you can also pre-download content so you have it available for offline studying. We’ll even make sure to download in the background and only when you’re on WiFi.

Keep up the great work and as always, contact us for any support.

Training Tip #004: Stay connected

Now more than ever it’s key to keep up your connections with friends, co-workers, families, and/or online buds who share the same goals as you.

Working step-by-step towards a goal like a cert exam is hard and solitary. Check out some of these Cloud Academy resources to build out your support network for when you have questions, need encouragement, or just want a break.

What are some resources to try out?

Cloud Academy Support

Chat directly with a live Customer Support representative. Simply go to our new pricing page and click the “Support” button on the bottom right. As always, you can still email support@cloudacademy.com.

Reddit

The Cloud Academy subreddit was just relaunched and is moderated by our staff:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cloudacademy/

Cloud Academy Instructors

Check out our instructor bios here: https://cloudacademy.com/instructors/

You can contact them on LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as contacting us directly on social media.

Webinars

Hop on a webinar and ask a question, or even recommend one for us to do. You’ll find our hosts and instructors friendly and eager to help.

What’s coming up next from Cloud Academy?

Keep yourself up-to-date by checking out our constantly updated content roadmap here. You’ll get updates on exciting new content covering:

• Docker Certified Associate Exam Prep
• Kubernetes
• CI/CD
• Alibaba Cloud
• And lots more

Training Tip #003: Set a goal

Not sure where to start your learning? Are there too many awesome cloud subjects you want to master? Let’s leapfrog over that option paralysis and let the experts help you out — let’s choose a certification learning path!

Why start with a certification?

The experts at big cloud providers and other groups have done the hard work to establish what is important to know at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels.

We build the learning framework. Now you just go in, climb up that ladder, and execute on all the cool learning opportunities we provide. Plus, along the way, you’ll find out new tangents that you’re interested in and you can follow those, too.

Some certification learning path added bonuses:

• Provide a step-by-step process
• Demonstrate having reached an industry-standard proficiency level
• Are a good short-term goal, approximately 3-6 months in total

Cloud Academy’s Certification Learning Paths

You’re sure to find something interesting in this list of all our current cert learning paths…

AWS Certifications

Azure Certifications

Google Cloud Platform Certifications

DevOps Certifications

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Exam Preparation
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Exam Preparation
• TOGAF 9 Foundation and Certified Level 1 and 2

Newly-Added Certifications

• Preparation for the (ISC)² CISSP Certification (Preview)
• ITIL 4 Foundation Certification in IT Service Management

If you’re looking for something different, feel free to just jump right into your dashboard to find another learning path. If you’re not yet a Cloud Academy member, you can get started with any of our hundreds of learning paths with a 7-day free trial.

Training Tip #002: Set a training time reminder

Routines, routines, routines. As unsexy as they may sound, routines are the foundation for any sort of positive habit. Starting something new is hard, so use our training time reminders to get bite-sized chunks of study time on your calendar. After a few weeks of your new routine, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how it becomes second nature.

You can quickly create these from your Cloud Academy dashboard. Just click “Add a Training Reminder” and boom — your time is booked.

PRO TIP: Choose a short amount of time to start (maybe 30 minutes), and make it a time when you are least likely to be distracted. Are you a morning person or a night owl? Whichever works for you, just try one of them and modify as needed. And get yourself a nice cup of tea or coffee, too.

That’s it! We’re here to help you make things simpler. Let us know your thoughts.

Training Tip #001: Install the app

We know it’s tough to stay on track. That’s why we’re introducing Cloud Academy’s new training tips to help you stay motivated to study. Let’s dive right into why we think this tip deserves the top spot. 

The post Cloud Academy Training Tips appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Management Dashboard Facelift

We’ve given the Management Dashboard a makeover to make it faster and easier than ever to manage teams, assign training, and track progress. Our Teams and Members pages are now combined under “Organization,” which enhances the previous functionality and comes with a brand-new look and feel. Never miss a join request for your team, and ensure every member is assigned to the right team with this new view, which makes it super simple to see if anything’s out of place in your organization. The new look of our sidebar makes it quick to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Managing teams is clearer than ever:

These improvements to the interface are just the tip of the iceberg. On top of the sleeker interface and faster interactions, we’ve introduced a whole suite of new features to make scaling your training as seamless as possible.

New feature: Reflect your organization’s hierarchy with subteams

The release of subteams allows your managers more flexibility and autonomy to manage training cycles and track progress. Now, a Team Manager is empowered to create as many teams and subteams as they like within a team they manage. This allows you to reflect your organization’s hierarchy and gain the visibility you need to stay organized and train efficiently.

A Team Manager at the parent level is able to deploy training plans and assessments to the whole team — including their subteams — in one go, and can see aggregated insights of every direct and indirect report:

New feature: Stakeholders on the team level

The Stakeholder role, which allows a user to see powerful insights into an organization’s training progress, is now available on a team level as well. This means you can have read-only users present on a specific division, geographical region, or set of teams without exposing full company data.

New feature: Organization-wide advanced search

Our new search tool searches everything you need access to — from teams, to members, to join requests, and more — with powerful filtering options to make sure you can find all the relevant data you need in a few clicks.

New feature: Custom tags for teams

Teams can now be tagged and searched for by their tag. This gives you a wide variety of options for tagging by training domain, certification, location, and any other use case that suits your team best.

New feature: Pinboard for bulk actions and monitoring progress

Our new pinboard is a recent improvement to help you make bulk operations for members and teams. Pin as many teams and members as you like, and they’ll remain in the pinboard for you to easily take bulk actions across the Management Dashboard.

When bulk actions are in progress, completed, or have encountered an issue, they’re all visible in the pinboard’s new “Alerts” section, where you can see a history of recent actions and their outcomes.

Saving the Best for Last 

New feature: Only pay for content access

To make sure your teams can make the most of the new powerful organization framework, we’ve gone a step further and simplified how we handle licensed users. Previously, a Team Manager or an Admin needed a license to be able to manage the organization or their teams’ training cycles — even if they didn’t want to train on Cloud Academy themselves. With the release of this suite of new features, now you only pay for licenses that need content access, and all other licenses are free! Assigning users a Team Manager, Admin, or Stakeholder role is totally independent of whether the user is paying for content access or not — it’s up to you to decide who needs a license with content access and who doesn’t.

(Existing customers wishing to take advantage of this change should contact their CSM to arrange the migration of their users with content access.)

As organizations grow and evolve, the need for efficiency in your workflow increases. We hope all these new features help you “spark joy” as you scale your training. As always, if you have any questions or comments, reach out to us at support@cloudacademy.com!

The post “Spark Joy” With Our New Team Organization and Management Tools appeared first on Cloud Academy.

Training Plans are powerful tools for learners and managers alike. With a Training Plan, you assign training to yourself or others and set a due date based on your weekly time commitment. If you are unusually busy one week and can’t manage enough training hours, that’s no problem. You can always make up the time the next week, just so long as you finish all the content by the due date. The scheduling tools and reminders in the Training Plan make it easy to see at a glance whether you are on pace to accomplish your training goal by the due date.

What happens, though, if that unusually busy week is the last week of the Training Plan, and you miss the due date? Previously, the system would simply change the status of the Training Plan to expired and stop tracking your progress through the materials. The Training Plan would appear on your dashboard but without the Resume button. After all, the past is in the past, and tomorrow is another day. You wouldn’t want to delay starting your next Training Plan just because you got behind on this one.

Giving up and moving on can be pretty frustrating, though. You still want credit for the hard work you put in, both for your own sense of accomplishment and to give your manager an accurate picture of the skills you’ve acquired. You were a day or two late finishing a Training Plan, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t master the skills!

A new approach to due dates

We realized that the Training Plan needed to accommodate those times when urgent work gets in the way of training time. That’s why we’re announcing that Training Plans can now stay active after the due date.

With this change, the Training Plan remains active until you finish it, or until the manager who assigned it decides to archive it. The Training Plan continues to appear with the Resume button on your dashboard, and your manager can keep monitoring your progress through the content on the management dashboard and in reports.

One of the best parts is that the next Training Plan does not have to wait until this one is complete. If you have a queue of Training Plans, the next one simply starts on its scheduled start date and runs in parallel to the old Training Plan. This gives you the chance to put in a little extra effort and catch up. It removes the penalty that you used to pay if a heavy week at work happened to coincide with the last week of a Training Plan.

Important: Your existing Training Plans will be migrated to use this new due date approach to avoid a confusing mix of new and old approaches during the transition.

What if I liked it the way it was?

There’s good news for you, too. Managers can choose to keep the previous expiration behavior on a Training Plan-by-Training Plan basis.

The Settings tab on the Training Plan gives you the new option to Force Training Plan expiration. By default this option is off, but if you decide to enable it, the system goes back to working the way it did before. When the due date passes, the Training Plan expires and the management dashboard and reports do not reflect any more progress on the content. 

Tip: You can change this setting after the Training Plan is already expired in case you want it to disappear from the dashboards of learners who haven’t finished it.

What we’re all about 

At Cloud Academy, we are focused on delivering innovative, enterprise-ready training technology that enables organizations to continuously improve the way they do business. Expect Cloud Academy to continue to deliver easy ways to motivate your teams within the context of your enterprise systems and processes.

If you aren’t already on this journey to deliver technology training in an effective way, we hope you join us.

For those on the journey with us, thank you. If you have questions about Training Plans, please speak with your Customer Success Manager.

The post Goals Are Dreams with Deadlines: Completing Training Plans After the Due Date appeared first on Cloud Academy.

There’s no doubt about it, customers love our hands-on labs! Our industry-leading labs give you practical experience in real cloud accounts on AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, and more. We provide step-by-step instructions to guide you through real-world scenarios, so you can learn the production-level experience you need to succeed in the cloud. 

While we’ve heard great feedback about our hands-on labs since launching them back in 2013, we understand it can be challenging if you don’t have two computer screens to use — one for the labs instructions that you’re following, and one for writing your code. Previously, if you didn’t have two screens available, you’d have to switch back and forth between tabs on your computer to complete your labs successfully. 

That’s why we’ve now made it possible to access the instructions directly from your phone!

Now, when you start a lab from the web platform, you’ll immediately receive a push notification to your phone when you’re logged into the app. By simply tapping on that notification, you’ll be able to access the exact lab you’re on from the Cloud Academy mobile app. There, you can easily follow the step-by-step lab instructions using your smartphone as a second screen. 

If you don’t have the Cloud Academy mobile app installed yet, you can download it using the “send to your phone” button that you’ll find at the top of the screen here.

This is a magic link, meaning that the link will automatically download the mobile app for you, log you in (without the need to insert your credentials), and bring you to the active lab you’re on — easy peasy!

Following the lab instructions from your smartphone should make your hands-on lab experience a lot more seamless. Now you can focus on what you’re building in the cloud, without having to change tabs every time you need to look at the instructions. 

We’re always seeking customer feedback, as it directly impacts our product roadmap! We’d like to know what you think about this feature. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to send an email to support@cloudacademy.com.

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