Introducing GovLoop Academy: Transforming Learning for Government

Honestly, GovLoop started as just an idea of mine that it would be awesome to have a place online to learn from other awesome government employees.  Fast forward five years and I’m still in shock that GovLoop has grown to over  150,000 federal, state and local government employees like you, who every day collaborate, share insights, solve problems and advance careers.

I spend a lot of my time talking to our members (from featured bloggers to participants in our mentors program to commenters) and one thing that’s come up constantly the last few years, is that you want to grow in your career and want more training opportunities.  That’s why we host over 30 online trainings each year including this week’s virtual conference and last year alone over 30,000+ of you took our GovLoop online trainings.

We knew you wanted more online learning opportunities and we’ve spent the last year talking to hundreds of members to identify what additional ways we could help you in your career growth.

Today, we are incredibly proud and excited to announce the fruits of that labor – a new free learning platform that we believe will transform learning for government: GovLoop Academy. (Pretty cool Washington Post article that discusses GL Academy )

We are extending the learning experience from GovLoop to GovLoop Academy by:

• Offering 25+ free on-demand courses with deeper dives on topics relevant to your personal and professional growth (Public Speaking, Human-Centered-Design, Open Data).
• Creating a ranging of micro-learning opportunities (courses range from 10 minutes to 1 hour and each course is broken into short segments)
• Providing an online development plan (we call it an action plan) to track your goals/progress and collaborate with your mentors/bosses/peers
• Creating a series of interactive badges for completing series of courses

I want to personally thank our initial partners like Knight Foundation which awarded us a Prototype grant for this work, associations like AABPA who helped us build a couple courses, and all the great instructors who shared their insights.

Do me a favor and  sign up and take a free course today.

This is just the beginning of our vision and I’d love to hear from you (comment below or steve at govloop.com).  Got ideas for courses or instructors? Ways we can partner with your agency or association?  Suggestions on the technology? Send ’em my way

Oh and one other quick note – we’ve had a couple agencies inquire about using the platform behind GovLoop Academy as their LMS. Also, we built all the videos and interactive content you see there with our learning services team and we can create similar learning experiences for your agency. Shoot me a note on that front if you’d like to hear more.

Now, let’s start learning! academy.govloop.com