Archer Community

Hey everyone! Megan Olvera here with some helpful tips and answers to the most commonly asked questions I've fielded. If you have a question not answered here, please send me a note and I'll get your answer to you and possibly add your question here as well.   Where can I find the current schedule of Archer classes? Here! How do I contact you to request my on-demand lab, to ask for advice about which class to take, or to find out if my company has any remaining training credits/units to use? This is better than a carrier pigeon! If I purchase an on-demand course, how soon is it available to me? Your course will be available immediately and you're welcome to begin it as soon as you like. Kindly note that if there's an associated lab that goes with that course, we wait for you to request the lab so that your available lab time doesn't expire before you've had a chance to block off time to complete the labs. Here's an article that goes into how training labs work. Can I download your training to put on my own company's intranet? Or - can my learners take your training without creating a learning account? No, I'm afraid not. There's a lot of side-eyeing that happens from our legal department when we start talking about that, and having everyone take the training from within our own platform helps us to collect the necessary feedback, lets us see how popular/useful certain courses are, and have access to a ton of other data that helps us to make the best decision possible. Just ask your learners to create an account with us. It's free and we'll even maintain a neat transcript for them and let them print out fancy certificates they can then hang on the wall as proof of their awesomeness. How do I pay for training? There are a couple of options. One - if you are buying in bulk for your organization, and/or if you need to go the Purchase Order/official route, reach out to your account rep. Don't have an account rep? Contact us and we'll send someone your way. Or, if you'd like to just make a purchase by credit card, that's an option as well. Head on in to our Learning Management System, find a course you'd like to take, add it to your cart, and then proceed through the payment process. Wait! Was this always possible, Megan? Why no, it sure wasn't! This is a new feature available to us, and we're super-excited to finally make credit card payments available again! I'm a manager of a team and I'd like to buy training for my team members. Is there a way to do that?  There sure is. Here's a link with instructions on how to make a bulk purchase via credit card. You can also work with your account manager to purchase a bank of training credits that can then be used as needed for any of our available training.  I have questions about Archer Certifications. What can you tell me about those? Head over here for a whole section dedicated to the latest on Archer Certifications. All of your training is done virtually now. When will you resume holding in-person classes? Since the COVID-19 pandemic, our world has shifted in a number of ways. We've found that even when we offered the occasional in-person class, more students than not preferred to learn from the comfort of their own offices or homes. So - now we offer our public schedule entirely online. Should you wish to have a private training session for your own group, we can discuss sending an Archer trainer to your location, with the corresponding expenses covered as an addition to the cost of the private session. If this is something you'd like to explore, work with your Archer account manager and/or contact us to get started. I registered for a class that starts next week (or at some point in the future.) When will I get actual login information about the class, materials, and so on? We typically do all necessary class prep on the Thursday of the week before the class (hence our registration cutoff dates), and your instructor will then take the details we send to them and will send you an email with all of that information, either late in the day on that Thursday, or possibly even on Friday. Be sure to check your junk mail folder or other locations for the email, as all students in the class are included on the BCC line and some email servers will flag that as the dreaded spam. If you haven't heard anything by midday Friday, please contact us! Will you give me a completion certificate for the training I complete? And will any of the training count for CPE credit? Yes, and (probably) yes. Once your course reaches the Completed status in our learning management system, you'll be given the option to Print a Certificate of Completion. Each certificate includes your name, the name of the class, the date the class was marked as complete, a brief description of what the course covered, and the number of CPE credits it may be worth. Follow-up: What do we mean by "(probably) yes" and "it may be worth"? Well, there are many many certifications out there that require CPE credits, and our training can be argued to apply to many of them. It'll be up to you to save your certificate and to turn that in as documentation of your continued education. We honestly haven't run into a single reported case where our training was not accepted as being valid for CPEs. There have been a couple of occasions where the certification's governing body performed an audit and wanted more details about the class. In those cases, providing a copy of the full course description (available from links here) have satisfied the auditors. Now, should you be renewing your dental hygienist certification, I can't promise that our training will do you any good, which is why I said "(probably) yes" in my first answer. But for those in the general GRC/IRM industry, you should be good to go.

  A common question we hear is, "When should we take Archer training?" And while our answer comes with a healthy dose of, "It depends...", here are some general recommendations that may help you navigate this ultra-important step in your organization's Archer journey. If you're brand new, or have new people joining your team, start with the free Getting Started with Archer course. This course will give you a  high-level look at what's included in our training portfolio AND documentation found within the Community, will include an overview of Archer as a whole, and a video tutorial that covers general Archer navigation and searching. For people who will be making decisions about the direction you want your Archer implementation to go, the Developing Archer Power Users and Business Analysts is a best-bet. If you have an entire team of people (up to 10 or even beyond), talk with us and with your account manager about scheduling a dedicated session of this course just for you. When presented to a single audience, this Power Users class often morphs into something of a Team Building Workshop, in which the participants all hear at the same time which Archer use cases are shared across functions, and they work together to help define a path to follow for their overall implementation. They also get a good look at any/all of the Archer components they've purchased, as they come out of the box. We encourage most organizations to start small and recognize some quick wins, and knowing what will work without additional configuration is key to reaching this goal. For best results, we recommend this course be taken prior to any configuration beginning. For your admins - and when we talk about admins, we're referring to those individuals who will be working under the Archer hood, so to speak. These are the people who will be adding fields, rearranging the layout, setting up email notifications, configuring data feeds, etc. For these people, Archer Admin I and Archer Admin II are still the go-to's for training. You can find our live schedule posted here, but definitely consider taking these courses in the self-paced/on-demand format if setting aside 4 consecutive days for each class will be tough to do, or if you simply prefer going at your own pace. As for the giant WHEN to train your admins - if you've not yet started configuring, having trained admins going into this process will allow them to take an active and informed role with the configuration.  I'd err on the side of training too early vs training too late.  Our entire training catalog can be viewed here: Archer Training Catalog Note that each course name can be clicked, leading you to a full description of the course in question. To take any of the training classes, you'll want to log in to our learning portal (instructions here) and visit the Store to add courses to your learning dashboard. If you have pre-purchased training credits, reach out to our team directly for assistance with registration. If you are looking to purchase training with a credit card, that can be done directly from within the learning portal. What other questions can we help answer? We'd love to hear from you. Click here to contact our team directly.  

Training Credits are a great option for organizations who choose to include Archer training for their teams but who may not quite know just yet how best to choose which training for which person. By including x-number of training credits in their purchase, they'll be able to lock in the price for those credits and will have a full 12 months* of time to decide how to use them. *Important to note - all training purchases expire 12 months from the date of sale. Definitely loop someone from Archer Academy into your training discussions to help narrow down your scope and ensure you purchase the right amount to cover your needs (but not so many that they'll go to waste.) When you're ready to make use of the training credits (example - your new Archer Admin has just been hired and you'd like to set that person up for success by having them take Archer Admin I): Reach out to us. Let us know the name & email of the student and the courses(s) of interest. For courses that offer the self-paced/on-demand delivery option as well as the virtual instructor-led version, let us know which version is preferred. If instructor-led is preferred, include the best session from the schedule here: https://www.archerirm.community/t5/course-catalog/archer-training-schedule/ta-p/670702  We will handle the registration(s) from our side and the system will send them a confirmation email for each course selected. We will then manually deduct the necessary credits from the organization's balance. Engaging us in this process helps to ensure that someone in the department down the hall from you doesn't sneak away and use up the credits that your group has specifically paid for. ;) Curious to know how to purchase credits, or want to get a start on budgeting? Each class requires x-number of credits. Those credit requirements are per-person, and can be seen in the right-most column on our list of all available training classes. Once you have an idea of the number of credits you'd like to purchase, contact your account rep and they'll help you out with the purchase side of things. Curious about the cost of credits?   Each credit = $1 USD. Except in specific regions of the world, where some fancy monetary calculations apply. Again, reach out to your account rep, and they'll walk you through it. What can credits be used for?   Absolutely anything in our catalog, except for the Archer On-Demand/Self-Paced training subscription. That subscription is the one thing that's purchasable only for a flat price. When we say Anything (subscription aside), that means you can use them for individual on-demand classes, individual seats in instructor-led classes, self-paced labs, and even certification exams. They really are kind of magical!  

Many of our courses include hands-on labs. When you're taking a course with a live instructor, the accompanying lab environment is automatically provided to you, with no action needed from you to request it. However, when you're taking a self-paced course that includes a lab, you actually have access to that course for 12 months, and we don't fire up the lab environment that goes with it until you tell us that you're ready to start working on the lab exercises. This helps to preserve resources and keeps the cost of our courses as low as possible. When you are ready to start the lab portion of your self-paced class, simply reach out to us following the instructions inside your on-demand course. Not in your course right now? Here's a handy link to our ticketing system, where we'll need you to tell us the name of the course you're taking and also which general region you're in (US, EMEA, or APAC) so that we can set your lab up on the closest possible server. Give us a business day or so to provision the lab, though it often takes us less time than that. Once we provision the lab, you'll receive an email from Skytap, the platform that hosts our lab environments. That email will include a link for you to launch the lab. Inside Skytap, you'll find a copy of the lab exercises and also a copy of the Student Guide that accompanies that course. Important: Once the lab has been launched, you'll have 20 hours of runtime across the next 4 weeks (28 days) to work through your lab exercises. When either the runtime or time limit has passed, the lab is automatically expunged from our system, and we cannot retrieve it. There is a timer running at the top of your lab environment, so you can always see how much time remains. If you find, as you are working in your lab, that you are running out of time, please be aware that you are able to purchase additional lab time, but remember that we need to receive that request BEFORE your lab time has expired. The time allotted for you to work through the lab exercises for each course is more than enough, and your lab will automatically go into Suspend mode after 20 minutes of inactivity, to ensure as little time as possible is wasted. If you have any questions about how this works, please contact us here. Happy learning!

Hello! In order to take Archer training, we require you to create an account in our system. It's free to do so, and will take just a few minutes of your time. If you already have an Archer Community account (this site), your account is very easy to activate: Simply go to your Archer Cloud portal page (https://id.archerirm.cloud) and click the Archer Academy button. Your name and email address will be passed into our learning portal and an account will automatically be created for you. If you do not yet have an Archer Cloud account, the following screenshots will walk you through the process of creating a new account. Go to https://id.archerirm.cloud  Click the Sign up link.   Enter your email address, a password, and first/last name, then click Register. A verification email will be sent to the email address you entered. Check your inbox for the email from no-reply@archerirm.cloud. Click the Activate Account button in the email. You will be taken to the Archer Cloud Portal. Click the Archer Academy button.  Clicking this button is what will create your Archer Academy profile and enable us to assist you with registrations. You will then be taken into the Archer Academy learning portal and land right on your Dashboard. If you've been pro-actively enrolled in training prior to your cloud account being created, look for that training on your Dashboard. To find all training available use the icons at the top of the interface to go to the Store, where you will find courses available for purchase and/or registration. If your organization has purchased training credits, please contact us for assistance in registering for classes using those credits. IMPORTANT: Kindly note that unless we've individually communicated to you otherwise, your new account will not automatically be linked to any training. If you are looking to make use of training credits that were previously purchased, please contact us and we'll assist in registering you for classes of interest. When you contact us for help using your training credits, we will need the following: Email address Company name Course name (and if a live session is desired, the dates of that live session) If you have a Sales Order number or other information related to a purchase already made, kindly include that as well, so that we can ensure we map your registration to the correct order. If you run into any questions at all, please contact us. We look forward to helping make your Archer training experience amazing! All the best, Megan Olvera Archer Academy