Tech Foundations

Introduction to Tech Foundations

Tech Foundations is a curation experience that includes a video course and assessment for twelve technology topics. Tech Foundations can give you the digital fluency to engage in key technical conversations. Tech Foundations covers concepts most impacting our world.

back to top

Getting started for admin

Tech Foundations is sold as an add-on experience to a Skills plan or as a standalone experience. For information about Tech Foundations reports see Tech Foundations for Leaders.

Add-on experience

If you would like to pair Skills and Tech Foundations together for your learners, you can purchase Tech Foundations as an add-on. An add-on allows admins and team managers to select specific learners to have access to Tech Foundations. To learn more about how to use add-ons, see Assigning and revoking licenses.

If you already have a Skills plan, reach out to your Pluralsight contact for more information about purchasing Tech Foundations as an add-on. If you would like to set up a Skills plan with Tech Foundations, please contact Pluralsight Sales (opens email form).

Standalone experience

The standalone experience has the same great content of the add-on experience but lets your teams focus on Tech Foundations. If you want to set up a standalone team plan for Tech Foundations, contact Pluralsight Sales (opens email form).

back to top

Getting started for learners

Logging in

See Accepting a team plan invite to learn how to set up your account or to use an existing Pluralsight account with Tech Foundations. If you’ve been assigned to a single-sign on (SSO) by your company, see Logging in to Skills using SSO.

Accessing Tech Foundations

1. Click View all topics on the homepage program component.
2. Choose a topic from the Tech Foundations curation page.
3. Choose to watch the topic video or take the assessment.

You can also choose from selected topics on the home page component. Once you've made a selection, continue on your learning journey.

Tech Foundations courses and assessments are also available on our mobile apps. See our mobile features article to learn how to access, and visit the downloads page (opens in new tab) to download the app and start learning.

back to top

Tech Foundations features

Each topic consists of two components: an optional topic video and an assessment. You can take the assessment before and/or after watching the topic video.

Topic videos

The topic videos are made specifically for Tech Foundations and cover each topic in broad terms. Each briefing is between 30 and 60 minutes and is broken down into sections, allowing you to review specific areas of a topic.

Viewing the topic is optional. If you feel confident in a topic, you can skip ahead and take the assessment. You can go back to the video if you want to fill in knowledge gaps. You can take the assessment twice every 24 hours.

The video player has several features designed to help you customize your learning experience. Please see Video player for best practices, including language settings, captions, playback speed, and more. See Using notes to learn how to leverage notes to retain your newly-learned skills.

Topic Assessments

Each 15-question assessment is scored as pass or fail. The number of correct answers required to pass varies by topic.

If you pass the assessment, you’re free to move on to another topic. You won’t be able to take the assessment again once you’ve passed it. If you didn’t pass the assessment, you’ll see topic concepts that you need to review. These concepts are linked to timestamped sections within the topic video, allowing you to refresh your knowledge and prepare for another assessment attempt. To protect Tech Foundations’ question bank, you won’t be able to see which questions you missed or the correct answers.

Each assessment allows you two attempts to pass it during a 24-hour period. If you have no remaining attempts, the assessment button will be disabled and will tell you how much time is remaining until you can attempt the assessment again. Sometimes interruptions come at the worst time. If you take a break and are inactive from the assessment for more than 72 hours, you’ll need to start over with a new attempt.

Each time you pass a topic assessment, you'll receive one point towards your program progress. Your program progress and topic assessment results are visible only to you and Pluralsight. Your organization will be able to see your video watch time, if you choose to watch any topic videos. See Pluralsight and data protection to learn how our privacy notice protects your data.

back to top

Troubleshooting

Errors

If you experience an error, try the following:

Advanced troubleshooting

If you're having trouble with Skills and haven't been able to resolve your issue, you can try some advanced troubleshooting using your browser's diagnostic tool and send the results to Support.

To run your browser's diagnostic tool:

1. Open our video player in your desktop browser, then open your browser's diagnostic tools (CMD-OPTION-S on Mac, or F12 on PC).
2. Go to the Console tab, then reload or refresh the page.
3. Take a screenshot of any errors that show up under the Console tab.
4. Navigate to the Network tab, refresh again to get the Network tab to populate, and take another screenshot.

Please contact Pluralsight Support (opens email form) with those screenshots and the details of your problem so we can look into this further for you.

back to top

If you need help, please contact Pluralsight Support.