EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY
LearningMate | July 12, 2022
LearningMate, the leading technology and content solutions company supporting edtech companies, educational institutions, government, and workforce agencies around the world, today announced its acquisition of JobReady, an online platform delivering high-quality, affordable, relevant career pathways and credentials for the 21st century to a million job seekers and career shifters.
In recent years, demand for new types of credentials has risen rapidly, and JobReady has helped workforce agencies, community colleges, and universities respond to this demand. The combination of the JobReady platform with LearningMate’s services and Frost's content management suite creates a powerful, end-to-end, lifelong learning and credentialing solution for workforce agencies and educational institutions to meet the fast-changing needs of employers and job-seekers across the world.
“In the past 18 months, JobReady has issued thousands of job-aligned credentials and created learning pathways for hundreds of careers, empowering colleges, workforce programs and training organizations to rapidly configure and establish affordable options for job seekers,” said Bill Hughes, CEO and founder of JobReady. “By joining the LearningMate family, the team will have access to the resources and technology capabilities needed to support this rapid growth and meet the needs of job-seekers and employers everywhere.”
“LearningMate and JobReady share a common vision for lifelong learning. I am excited to welcome JobReady customers and employees to the LearningMate family, JobReady customers will benefit from a world-class services team backed by one of the largest Edtech solutions companies in the world.”
Samudra Sen, LearningMate’s CEO
About LearningMate
LearningMate is a Straive group company that focuses on the needs of next-generation learners. The company builds on a strong foundation of learning design with progressive technology, digital media, and engineering solutions to connect today’s learners, educators, administrators, policymakers, and content creators with the information, tools, and solutions they need to be successful. With six consulting offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and India, LearningMate serves a global clientele of education publishers, traditional and non-traditional EdTech companies, K-20 schools, universities and career colleges, government agencies, non-profits, corporate learning departments, and education consortia. Learn more at http://www.learningmate.com.
About JobReady
JobReady is an adult-education and workforce development solution that connects learners to careers and provides affordable career skills training to individuals to improve their job readiness. Together with its partners JobReady offers a unique combination of a deep, career-fit assessment and curated career-aligned course collections from thousands of courses, enabling job seekers to follow upskilling pathways that lead to jobs and promotions. Initial pathways include cybersecurity, data science, project management, IT and networking, software development, skilled trades, manufacturing, project management, business skills, leadership, and certifications.
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CONTINUING EDUCATION
Smartria and Kitces.com | August 09, 2022
Smartria®, a powerful, easy-to-use cloud-based software solution designed to meet the specialized compliance management needs of investment advisors, compliance teams, operations teams, consultants, and attorneys, has announced a partnership with Kitces.com to provide online education content for CE credits through the Smartria platform to address the North American Securities Administrators Association’s (NASAA) Investment Adviser Representative Continuing Education (IAR CE) Model Rule. Kitces.com is home to the Nerd’s Eye View financial planning industry blog published by Michael Kitces, and a leading provider of advanced education for financial advisors.
“Smartria is proud to partner with Michael Kitces and Kitces.com, the preeminent industry thought leader in advisor education, We were very deliberate in our selection—we wanted to work with a partner who shared our vision of software as a partnership and was committed to helping us deliver a solution that meets our clients’ needs at scale. Smartria’s partnership with Kitces.com is a natural fit as we continue to innovate our compliance platform with new and distinctive offerings.”
-Mac Bartine, CEO of Smartria
Under the partnership, investment advisers who activate Smartria’s new IAR CE feature will gain instant access directly from the Smartria dashboard to all of the Continuing Education content provided by the Kitces.com Members Section, including not only the Nerd’s Eye View blog content, but Kitces white papers and webinars as well, which can fulfill both their new IAR CE obligation, as well as crossover CE credit for CFP certification, CPA licensees, Enrolled Agents, and advisors with advanced designations from the Investments and Wealth Institute and the American College. Future integrations under the partnership will facilitate automated firm-wide tracking and reporting in Smartria of all an investment adviser’s Kitces-earned IAR CE credits for all of their team members, to ensure annual compliance as additional states pass the NASAA Model Rule and implement their own IAR CE obligations in the coming years.
As financial advisors, we’re already subject to a myriad of overlapping rules and regulations, and overlapping Continuing Education obligations, and so as soon as the NASAA Model Rule was finalized last year, we began the process to qualify our Kitces.com educational content for IAR CE in addition to all of the other financial advisor licenses and designations we already covered, With CE demands continuing to rise, we’ve been developing our own systems to be able to better integrate with existing advisor platforms to facilitate multi-designation CE, and we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Mac and the rapidly growing Smartria team to power their IAR CE solution, as our first CE integration partner,said Michael Kitces, Chief Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com.
NASAA’s Model Rule was announced on November 30, 2020. Under the rule, an investment adviser representative is required to complete 12 CE credits annually to maintain their IAR registration. The rule applies to all registered IARs of both state-registered and federal covered investment advisers. Compliance begins with existing IARs and newly registered IARs in states that have adopted the model rule as of Jan. 1, 2022, which currently include Maryland, Mississippi, and Vermont.
About Smartria
Smartria is a leading compliance software platform for RIAs, hybrid RIAs and RIA networks. The firm’s software excels at making the complex and often frustrating world of regulatory compliance simple to manage and easy to understand. Smartria’s unique roles for compliance consultants and distributed management of large corporations make its solution able to handle any compliance problem for any sized company. For more information, please visit www.Smartria.com.
About Kitces.com
Kitces.com publishes the #1 financial planning industry blog, Nerd’s Eye View, and provides a wide range of advanced educational content for financial advisors through both nerdy long-from educational articles, research white papers, in-person and virtual live events, on-demand and livestream webinars, and online courses. The Kitces.com Members Section provides continuing education credits for a wide range of financial advisor licenses and advanced professional designations, including CFP certification designations from the Investments & Wealth Institute and American College, CPE for CPAs and Enrolled Agents, investment adviser representative (IAR) CE obligations, and more.
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CONTINUING EDUCATION
Jenzabar Inc. | June 06, 2022
The premier innovator in higher education technology, Jenzabar Inc., launched the Campus Movement, an initiative to provide learners with practical skills. The initiative reflects Jenzabar’s commitment to building a world where anyone is able to learn and follow their passion. As part of the initiative. Jenzabar released the Campus Marketplace. The platform will empower educational institutions to offer courses for a broad audience of learners. It is a branded online storefront that will allow all students, enrolled or not, to register and pay for the courses they take. Jenzabar also recently acquired Spark451, which offers services to help develop enrolment strategies to enrol and retain students.
“Everyone should be able to become their own masterpiece, but the current education system does not work for all students. We need to think about how to build an education system that takes into account new economical landscapes, competitive work environments, and rapidly changing learner demographics, all of which have made it more difficult for individuals to get the education they need to succeed. The Campus Movement envisions a path forward in this challenging climate and aims to light the way for institutions to help learners acquire the skills they need to find lucrative careers. The Campus Movement is the roadmap to a more accessible, attainable, and affordable world of education.”
-Ling Chai Maginn, Jenzabar Founder, President, and CEO
With Campus Marketplace, institutions will be able to:
Streamline registrations for learners looking for non-credit courses
Organize and deliver multiple course catalogs on a modern, sleek digital ecommerce storefront
Allow both enrolled students and unenrolled learners to register and pay for non-credit courses through a school’s website
Integrate with Jenzabar One to deliver a seamless exchange of data as well as allow schools to track students’ academic journeys
“The traditional admissions recruitment environment has been disrupted. I rely on Spark451 to help Bloomfield College differentiate itself and engage future students in digital and social spheres.”
-Kevin Cavanagh, Vice President for Enrollment at Bloomfield College
The Campus Movement addresses the disconnect between traditional higher education degrees, changing student profiles, and the jobs that businesses need to fill. The Campus Movement also highlights how we envision the future of modern higher education, where learners of all types are empowered to pick their own pathways to earn the jobs they want and become their masterpiece.
Omer Riaz, Vice President of Strategy & Innovation at Jenzabar
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