Excellent Educational Resource

Submitted by Jason Powell
in
General Questions and Comments

I'd like to recommend an excellent educational resource to everyone, especially those thinking about moving into management, or those who are fairly new to management.

My previous employer offered a SkillSoft subscription (http://www.skillsoft.com) to any employee interested in furthering their development, which I took full advantage of. SkillSoft offers hundreds of online courses focusing on both IT and business curricula.

My current employer does not offer such a benefit, but I contacted SkillSoft directly, and was able to get an individual, one-year subscription (30 courses) for only $500 (less than $17 per course).

Catalog at: http://www.skillsoft.com/catalog/default.asp

SkillSoft does not normally market to individuals, so if anyone has trouble getting information about this type of subscription, I'd be happy to give more detailed pointers.

I am NOT associated in any way with SkillSoft...it's just been a very handy (and effective) resource for me. As with Manager Tools and Career Tools, it's had a positive and measurable impact on my success.

 

Warmest regards to all,

 

Jason A. Powell, CISSP, CISM

Cincinnati, OH

jpowell@tuffmail.com

Submitted by John Failla on Tuesday July 28th, 2009 2:09 pm

I understand that they overhauled all of their business skills courses as well - went from basic webcasting to narrating animation to include some media-rich strategy.  I too am not connected to SkillSoft, but read something online (which I can't seem to find - darnit - to share with everyone).
Does anyone else have experience with SkillSoft? 

Submitted by Rich Ruh on Wednesday July 29th, 2009 12:45 pm

I have taken a few SkillPath classes over the course of my career.  I have found they are worth what you pay for them.
And you don't pay much...
--Rich
p.s. Oops, just noticed this original post was about SkillSoft, not SkillPath. I have no experience with SkillSoft.
 

Submitted by Ken Sexe on Wednesday July 29th, 2009 1:29 pm

Hello;
My company usees Skillsoft courses for training business skills and as such I think that they are good courses. They do have a lot of narration but the graphics are good. I do find that if you watch them online the bandwidth requirements can be a bit excessive (unless it is an issue of our company intranet and accessing it from outside the firewall).
Overall, I think that they are good for reviewing skills. I have serious reservations about people learning new skills with these as they do not have the "Mike and Mark-type" information but can be a bit canned at times. If you want to keep current on old skills or are learning new skills while having a good understanding of business skills in general I think they definitely have value.
And for you PMI members out there: I hear that they give PDU's for Skillsoft courses. I have yet to try getting credit for the ones I have taken but this may be worth looking into.