The Learn IT+ 8 Hour Challenge

The Learn IT+ 8 Hour Challenge

We all owe it to ourselves to invest time in our own professional development on a regular basis. This is a priority for IT Leadership Team and so we have instituted The Learn IT+ 8 Hour Challenge to support that! All IT Staff are allowed and encouraged to spend 8 hours per month toward your own professional development, no questions asked!

What does that mean? Whatever you’d like! If you come up with a plan for what you want to learn about to improve your work in some way, you have blanket permission to set aside 8 hours per month of “On the clock” time on meeting that goal. This could be done as one full workday, or spread out over multiple days.

There are many training resources available to you for free, listed below. If you want to take a training class that has some kind of expense, the normal Learn IT+ process will walk you through how to request purchase approval from IT Leadership.

There are many sources of free Professional Development to leverage for this challenge:

• LinkedIn Learning is a hugely useful tool to help you support your clients, but more important is the ways it can help you expand your own capabilities. It has extensive content about a huge variety of software applications, business practices, and other vital professional topics. It also has a lot of technical certification prep courses including CompTIA, CISSP, Project Managment, and much more!
  
• Microsoft’s Imagine Academy is another fantastic resource for this challenge that you should leverage, containing lots of training content on many of Microsoft’s services, as well as having some free vouchers for certification tests available.
  
• There are many more ways to use this time, some of which are described on the Step 3: Find Professional Development page, but think creatively here. If you can think of something we haven’t thought of to meet the Learn IT+ 8 Hour Challenge, than you can do it!

Ray will make monthly calls out to find out who is participating in this challenge at the end of each month, using our All IT Staff channel in Microsoft Teams. Look out for that monthly post and share your accomplishments each month.

If you have any questions about this new program, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Ray, or to your supervisor to learn more.

We look forward to learning all the exciting ways that you will each meet The Learn IT+ 8 Hour Challenge!