Global Knowledge has been honored with Microsoft’s 2015 YouthSpark Citizen Partner of the Year Award and Microsoft’s Partner of the Year Finalist Award for excellence in IT training and public service, the company announced.
The two awards cover the training programs and various learning styles of Global Knowledge and their commitment to helping individual and teams. The YouthSpark award is for the pilot program “Learn to Code” which was started in Toronto for homeless teens and young adults. It taught them valuable coding, programming and other fundamental computer skills to improve their job readiness and career outlooks. The winning YouthSpark program was a partnership between Global Knowledge, CCI Learning and Covenant House, the largest privately funded homeless youth charity in the Americas. Students were also able to take Microsoft Technology Associate classes and a pre-employment workshop covering Microsoft Word, Excel and OneNote to learn resume-building and other professional communication and analysis skills.
“Addressing the IT skills gap takes out-of-the box thinking,” says Brian Branson, CEO and president, Global Knowledge. “This ongoing basic computer literacy program enables us to start empowering the next generation of Web developers and opens up the digital world to an untapped resource: disenfranchised young adults. These students have the ability to transform their lives and the IT industry with these new skills.”
Meanwhile the company got a Microsoft Learning Partner of the Year Finalist Award for the deployment of cutting-edge practices and creative innovative training solutions. In this case they were for the training of personnel of the US Navy and the US Department of Justice and teaching them to work better with Microsoft applications. Amongst them System Center, Exchange Server, Windows Server, SQL Server, Windows Client and SharePoint Server.
Since there were multiple applications, students were provided with additional help outside of classes and unlimited access to online mentors, video recordings of the sessions. Global Knowledge is the only company to provide 12 months of post-class Microsoft training exclusives.
“Learning isn’t a one-time event,” said Michael Fox, SVP, Enterprise Solutions for Global Knowledge. “We feel students should have the ability to go back to their course recordings and lab environments so they can perfect their newfound skills. Mentoring support and class retakes also ensure an individual has all the easily accessible tools they need to succeed.”