MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Earn and keep your PMP certification

Getting and staying certified by the Project Management Institute takes a hefty number of education credits, or Professional Development Units (PDUs). You must take a certain number of PDU credits to qualify for the PMP or CAPM certification, and you must continue to earn PDU credits every three years.

MindLeaders is a Registered Education Provider for the Project Management Institute, and two more of our series have been approved for PDU credits.

You can take any of the following series for PDU credits. Project 2007 and Project Management from a People Perspective are the two new ones. Each of these courses include the ability to print out the necessary paperwork for your credits.

• Project Management Professional Certification 2005
• Project Management
• Effective Business Communication
• Fundamentals of Business Management
• Project 2007
• Project Management from a People Perspective
• Time Management Fundamentals
• Time Management for Maximum Productivity

Check out our Project Management certification information sheet for more details or drop a note in the comments if you have any questions.

The Top Ten Training Needs

MindLeaders gets a lot of information about what people want to learn more about. We hear it through our clients, usage of our courses, the topics people ask us for or search our listings for, and conversations with others in the industry. An important part of my job is trying to distill all that information to figure out what training topics are important, and who they're important to.

Here are the latest results of the top ten topics that have the most demand for online training:

1. Microsoft Excel
2. Communication
3. Customer Service
4. Project Management Professional (PMP)
5. Project Management
6. Time Management
7. Microsoft Access
8. Microsoft Word
9. CompTIA A+
10. Management

A couple of notes about the results:

• Excel is #1 by a HUGE margin. It seems to be a perfect storm of an application in ubiquitous use and complex enough that lots of people feel a need to know more about it.
• Project Management is so gigantic that I track the PMP certification separately from general project management, and yet the split vote still makes #4 and #5 on the list. (Combined, they still wouldn't quite beat Excel for the #1 spot.)

According to Bersin & Associates' brand-new Corporate Learning Factbook 2009, the topic areas this top ten falls into (Desktop Applications, Interpersonal/Soft Skills, and Management/Supervisory) are #9, #6, and #5 on their survey of training priorities. I think the difference is because they're tracking overall training programs (so company-specific information is easily #1), while I'm tracking the e-learning needs in particular. My results are a subset of the larger training industry.

What do you think of this top ten? Does it cover the topics you think of first when you think about online learning needs for yourself or your company?