Thanks for coming back to the Enky, Inc. blog! If this is your first visit, my name is Mike Coté and I am the co-founder and CEO of Enky, the first online professional education marketplace. Enky was founded by professionals to make the continuing professional education process more transparent and competitive, while allowing customers greater selection and freedom of choice. Our mission is to make all aspects of professional education and accreditation as simple and straightforward as possible, while providing features that save users’ time and organizations money. In this blog post, I will describe some of these key features in more detail, including our proprietary Course Recommendation Engine. These features are only available to registered users of Enky.com, which will be launching in the coming months (subscribe to this blog for updates!). Fortunately for you, registering as an Enky user is
completely free of charge! Now, let’s discuss some of the amazing benefits you receive as a registered user at Enky.com.
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Enky SmartTrack: SmartTrack allows users to upload previously taken credits, track and manage current and future education, and set and measure progress towards certification or education-related goals.
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Course Recommendation Engine: Enky’s proprietary Course Recommendation Engine (CRE) combines individual user data with broad insights generated from collective Enky user browsing activity to learn about a user’s interests and suggest courses that both suit the user’s distinct interests and fulfill mandatory credit requirements. The CRE may even help you find a field you would never have known you were interested in!
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Deadline Digest: This periodic newsletter is customized to each individual user to best remind her of her upcoming certification, licensure, and course sign-up deadlines. Deadline Digest also includes recommendations from CRE about which courses to take, as well as updates on new regulations that apply to the individual’s profession(s) and state(s) of licensure.
Enky SmartTrack
Enky SmartTrack is the backbone of the features suite that is offered to Enky users, and many other Enky features interact with and use the data gathered by SmartTrack to enhance the value provided to our customers. SmartTrack is our system for tracking and managing continuing education credits and courses, as well as setting and measuring progress towards education or profession-related goals. SmartTrack allows users to upload previous course credit data to the Enky cloud, where it will be synced and compared against our comprehensive course database. If the course is found in our archives, the relevant information related to the course will be pre-populated into the user’s profile in the SmartTrack system. Once a user books a course through Enky, that course and any subsequent credit(s) gained therein are automatically associated with the user in SmartTrack. The system associates users with the profession(s) they are licensed in, as well as the state(s) in which they are licensed so as to automatically calculate the progress made towards mandated professional education requirements (if any). Users may also set goals for themselves manually or select from curated goals related to certifications, education credits, or other professional development milestones and measure progress towards these goals within SmartTrack.
Course Recommendation Engine
“We have CPE Credits for YOU!!!”, “CONTINUING LEGAL EDUCATION – CLASSES AVAILABLE”, “Online Nursing Degr. – Attend Day or Night!” Don’t you hate spam emails like these? I sure do, and it seems like many of you do as well. One of the biggest complaints we have heard related to professional education is not always the inability to find some sort of course for credit, but the inability to find any courses or trainings that are
actually of interest or that can be useful to professionals practicing in the field today. This is where we come in. Enky is developing a proprietary Course Recommendation Engine (CRE), which combines individualized user data with broader insights gained from the Enky user base to suggest courses which may be of interest to a specific user. We are able to do this by leveraging our massive database resources, along with informed participation from our registered user base.
Individual user data gathered from SmartTrack will only be used to suggest courses for that particular user, while general Enky browsing history and surveys of users will be used to continually improve the algorithm. The CRE will be able to combine these data sources to generate topics of interest to users and suggest areas of study that the user may not have even considered. Within these categories, the CRE will recommend specific courses that not only fit both the individual user’s interests and preferences, but work towards any SmartTrack mandatory education requirements or user-set goals. The Course Recommendation Engine will be a major feature of Enky.com at launch, and will only improve with time and increased use. Here at Enky, we aspire to be a model for transparent and fair use of customer data, and we promise to do our best to be an example for responsible data collection while still delivering a great service.
Deadline Digest
Now that you have registered for an Enky account, uploaded your previous professional education credits into SmartTrack, and had the Course Recommendation Engine suggest a few interesting and useful courses, what else is there for you to do on Enky.com? Once all that is done, you can use the site to browse thousands of professional education courses from providers throughout the United States, compare courses and providers to see what best fits your unique situation, save your favorites, and book a course directly through the Enky platform if you so desire! Even after all of that, there is still more…the dreaded licensure and certification renewal process. Every state in the US has their own special rules and regulations for each distinct profession and even people practicing the same profession in the same state may have different license or certification renewal deadlines! Even if you do happen to remember the right deadline, what happens if you missed out on the required continuing education credits? Or you took enough credits, but in the wrong subjects? How is one to navigate the continually changing and confusing list of laws and regulations? Enky has the solution to that problem as well. Deadline Digest is our automated email newsletter that is customized for each registered Enky user. Each ‘issue’ of the Digest will contain summaries of the newest and most updated rules and regulations pertaining to the specific user’s profession (s) and state(s) of licensure, including any mandatory continuing education, the number of credits required, and what specific courses or type of courses are needed (if any).
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| Never miss another renewal deadline with help from Enky.com! |
Deadline Digest has more than just law summaries, however. Every copy will update users on their progress towards mandated education credit goals and when they are ‘due’, where the user stacks up against their peers in terms of this progress, and Enky’s tips and suggestions on how to get to license renewal in good standing. These proactive updates will help ensure that licensed professionals remain that way – licensed.
Please let us know in the comments section below if you love, like, or hate these features, if there is anything we can do to improve upon them, or if you want more information about the features or Enky in general. If you are interested in learning more about the company, check out my first blog post titled
“What is Enky?” We sincerely hope you will join us at Enky.com once the site is officially launched in the coming months, and we look forward to seeing you back here soon for more information on our team, services we provide for enterprise and small business, and guest posts from other licensed professionals.
Yours truly,
Mike Coté
Enky, Inc. CEO/Co-Founder
