Forecast Academy trainings and certifications

Whether you’ve used a project management platform before, or whether this is your first, when it comes to using Forecast, learning the ropes is essential. The Forecast Academy is here to help, giving you the power to use the platform to its full potential. The Academy also saves you any time you might spend training-up others once you have gotten to know the platform yourself. Simply enroll your team, and let them learn in their own time.

Below we will give you an overview of the Forecast Academy, let you know how you can access it, and give you an idea of some of the content available to our subscribers.

• Overview of the Forecast Academy offering
• Accessing the Academy
• What’s Included

Overview of the Forecast Academy offering

The Forecast Academy contains an extensive range of learning materials, which not only cover the platform itself, but also offer training on areas such as project and resource management.

Each course contains a variety of media - including text, videos, and interactive diagrams - ensuring that everyone can learn in the way that suits them best. Some of the longer courses, or those which cover more complex topics, have short knowledge checks at the end of them. These knowledge checks not only help you - by indicating which parts of the course you have learned best, and which parts you might need to return to - but also help us to decide where there might be an opportunity for another course.

Each course ends with a short survey, which helps us get a sense of where the Academy is performing well, and where we could improve. Any feedback you provide in these surveys is greatly appreciated!

New content is uploaded to the Academy regularly, averaging around two new courses per month. As we have suggested, we try to respond to our customers’ needs when choosing which courses to create next, and we are always open to suggestions.

Accessing the Academy

To access the Forecast Academy, your organization needs to have purchased a subscription. Subscriptions are sold by the seat, and can be prorated if you are buying an Academy subscription part-way through your Forecast contract. Currently, one Academy seat, for one year, costs $200.

Once you have bought an Academy seat, or seats, we will send you and any other intended users a welcome email, containing joining instructions, and an access code that is unique to your organization. Once a user has configured their Academy profile, they will have full access to Academy materials.

You can increase your number of Academy seats at any time. Just get in touch with your Customer Success Manager, who can organize this for you.

What’s Included

Because Academy content is regularly updated - often in response to what you want to see included - it is constantly changing. There are, however, some fundamental types of Academy content. These are:

• Certifications: Certifications form the backbone of the Forecast Academy. They are the detailed courses which teach you how to use the platform effectively. Certifications exist for all five Forecast permission levels: Admin, Controller, Manager, Coordinator, and Collaborator, meaning that each member of your team can choose a course that reflects their experience on the platform. Each certification ends with a fifty-question assessment, the successful completion of which means that you are officially certified in using Forecast at that permission level.
  You can add a certification badge to your LinkedIn profile if you wish, indicating to other LinkedIn users that you are proficient in the platform.
  
  
• Pillars of Forecast: These collections cover the fundamentals of project management, resource management, financial management, our integrated intelligence features, reporting, Advanced Analytics, and our integrations. As well as containing Forecast-specific learning, these collections include more general learning on what it takes to manage your projects, resources, and finances effectively.
  
  
• What’s New: This part of the Academy contains short courses on new features in the platform. As they are kept separate from the main courses in the platform, they are an effective way to learn about new features, without having to search for the updated material in courses you may already have completed.
  
  
• How-To Guides: Our How-Tos function as quick reference guides for your day-to-day work. They are made up of a collection of short videos that can be accessed at any time, and in any order. You do not need to complete one video in order to view the videos that follow.

We hope to see you learning with us soon!