Ascend’s business National Healthcareer Association (NHA) partners with allied health education programs, organizations and employers across the nation to award more than 500,000 allied health certifications. It offers eight nationally accredited exams, certification preparation and study materials; industry- leading outcomes based data analytics, as well as ongoing professional development and continuing education for certification holders.

1. NHA was founded in New Jersey, but it also had a DC location. At the time NHA was acquired by ATI (before Ascend existed), this was the logo:
   
2. Joanne DiChiara is the longest NHA tenured employee, having been with us for 10-1/2 years.
3. Some of our first marketing swag included NHA bumper stickers, band aids, scrubs, lab coats and even branded POPCORN (it said “Pop on over to our website!”). Things have come a long way since then!
   
4. NHA story:  Jon Brandt was the founder of NHA.  He was unhappy with care his grandmother received while in the hospital and specifically while having blood drawn.  He wanted to ensure that others could receive better care from front-line health care workers. Jon wanted to establish standards by ensuring that frontline staff meet and maintain national competency levels!
5. Legend has it, NHA survived a fire that consumed half its office space in the early days.
6. Similar to ATI’s early days, NHA staff members used to take turns printing NHA exams in-office for distribution to customers.
7. NHA currently offers certifications in the following:
   • Certified Clinical Medical Assistant (CCMA)
   • Certified Phlebotomy Technician (CPT)
   • Certified Medical Administrative Assistant (CMAA)
   • Certified Pharmacy Technician (CPhT)
   • Certified Billing and Coding Specialist (CBCS)
   • Certified EKG Technician (CET)
   • Certified Electronic Health Record Specialist (CEHRS)
   • Certified Patient Care Technician/Assistant (CPCT/A)
8. NHA currently has 63 employees based in Leawood and across the country!
9. In 2015, NHA awarded its 500,000th certification!
10. Earlier this spring, NHA released its first publication of access™, a one-of-a-kind resource with original research created specifically for the allied health community.

CDX Learning Systems, part Ascend, is a leading provider of online curriculum, assessment, and reporting for automotive, truck and bus technician training.

Help wanted! Half of all current automotive and diesel technicians will be eligible to retire by 2024. Increasingly, students and parents realize that earning a degree in a skilled trade offers faster job placement and lower student debt. But how do automotive instructors, former technicians themselves, overcome the challenges of teaching today’s generation of digital-native students to be successful at work?

1. CDX Learning Systems offers online courseware and textbooks for teaching automotive and diesel technology. By organizing materials to clearly address the core competencies students must learn, CDX makes it easier for instructors to organize their teaching and for students to build skills that work.
   In 1994, CDX Global was founded in Brisbane, Australia, offering automotive training video libraries. After expanding rapidly for the next fifteen years, the company was acquired by Jones & Bartlett Learning in 2009.
   
2. At the beginning, the videos were organized into “toolbox” sets of CD-ROMs. The discs were navigated via an onscreen menu with a design resembling the letter “X.” Hence, the name “CDX.”
3. In 2011, its Australian-made instructional videos were offered in American English. ‘Spanners’ were finally referred to as “wrenches,” “tyres” were localized to “tires,” and Americans learned about “trunks” rather than “boots.”
4. CDX’s first textbook, Fundamentals of Automotive Technology, was intended to contain 600 pages, but had over 2,000 by the time it was published. The second edition, published in February 2017, is the first on the market to align to 2017 industry standards.
5. Over 80 percent of schools in the U.S. teaching diesel technology switched to adopting the Medium/Heavy Duty Commercial Vehicle Systems and Diesel Engines(2015) curriculum within its first year of publication.
6. CDX Learning Systems serves training programs around the world, as it is utilized on six continents and in 50 different countries.
   
7. Most of the CDX team works from home offices that range from Australia to Canada to nine different U.S. states. The Road Warriors (aka the sales team) spends months out of the year visiting campuses, demoing products, making presentations and attending conferences.
8. The team includes four ASE Master Technicians, one of the highest levels of credentials automotive technicians can earn. They ensure CDX’s materials and content meet the needs of students who will soon begin successful careers in a demanding industry.
9. CDX continues to aggressively expand its product lines by publishing seven new titles this year. In 2018, CDX Learning Systems will begin to offer HVACR courseware, taking the business’s first steps in expanding to offer curriculum across the skilled trades.

Read more about the skills gap crisis in this recent Denver Post article.

What does a day in your work life look like? With almost a dozen Ascend offices and about 1,000 employees (250 of those working remotely) it can be hard to visualize exactly what everyone does each day, and how all efforts come together to impact our mission of changing lives.

The Day in the Life series showcases employees’ work at Ascend and sheds light on how personal trainers, remote employees, sales team members, nurse educators and more change the lives of our customers every day.

Each employee we feature was given ample freedom with the project. We told them to shoot five or six short video snippets describing what they do on an average workday. What we’ll see is an honest look into their daily work life.

First up, we had Melissa Hamilton, a senior certification specialist with NHA who works remotely from Wisconsin.

Next, we have MedHub’s Eric Zerwas, a multimedia training coordinator.