If you find yourself wanting to upgrade your skills or learn new skills, E-Learning is one tool you should strongly consider. There are two basic types of E-Learning; Computer Based Training and Web Based Training. Generally speaking, Computer Based Training is stand alone software you by and run on your desktop or laptop computer where as Web Based Training is done on line with a subscription and runs on your web browser. E-Learning has come a very long way in the last few years with the enormous advancements in computer and Internet capacity.  E-Learning does generally lend itself to the Information Technology field quit well for obvious reasons. But there are many other high quality E-Learning courses available from accounting to business skills to general self improvement courses. I have compiled a list of some good websites that offer a large variety of E-Learning courses here.

But now I would like to focus on the IT field because that’s where I come from and have personally used some Computer Base Training courses for web development and Cisco certifications.

I’ll cover my Cisco certification studies first. I used a combination of the books from Cisco Press and a training video course from Train Signal. I really liked this course because first off it was very thorough and gave a lot of real world scenarios that you don’t usually find in the books. It included lab books and a copy of the Transcender practice exam all part of the course. But the best part, for me because I’m a visual kind of guy, was you get to see the instructor, in this case, Chris Bryant (CCIE# 12933) walk you through scenarios and examples on a real rack of routers and switches as you “look over his shoulder” as he telnets from router to router and explains what he’s doing and why and little quarks that might show up on in some cases. Again, you just cannot get that out of a book. Train Signal also has many other certification courses Including Microsoft, CompTIA, VMware, Wireless Networking, and Office 2007. It’s worth checking out.

The next E-Learning product that I highly recommend, and have personally used, is Total Training. Total Training covers more of the web development tools training and not so much in certifications. The course I used was for Microsoft Expression Web. Again this was a visual type of training. I learned how to build websites from the ground up by watching Janine Warner walk me through building several websites as I built my own using my installation of Expression Web. As a side note it really helps having two monitors.

I included a list of some other E-Learning companies that not only offer IT types of courses but other professional and/or personal development courses here.