Executive Team
Barry K. Fingerhut
Chief Executive Officer
Barry Fingerhut has been the CEO and majority equity owner of Certification Partners, LLC, since Fall 2010, when he moved from New York City to Paradise Valley, Arizona, to manage the company. He sees in Certification Partners the potential for a small, quiet company with excellent products to share its vision on a grander scale, helping schools and corporations to educate and certify individuals for a stronger, more knowledgeable workforce.
Previously, Fingerhut has been involved in many phases of the investment business. From 1981 to 2004, he served as President of GeoCapital, LLC (a registered investment advisory firm), which was sold in 1997 to Affiliated Managers Group. Prior to that, he served two years at First Manhattan Co. and four years as a limited and then general partner at Weiss, Peck & Greer.
Fingerhut has focused much of his career on public and private investing in small capitalization companies (defined primarily as under $1 billion in equity valuation), in the for-profit education and training, publishing, media, consumer services, hydrocarbon and financial services industries. In 1992, he co-founded Wheatley Partners, a venture capital partnership, specializing in investments in new technologies and services, and serving both corporate and public institutions. Currently, there are five outstanding partnerships.
In 2004, he formed Fingerhut Management, a family-and-friends investment office in New York City. In 2009, he co-founded Caregiver Institute, LLC, to address the enormous challenges of aiding home caregiver workers in the United States. Caregiver Institute utilizes immersive learning technologies to serve the skills and enhance the emotional sustenance of the caregiver demographic.
Since 1992, Fingerhut has served on a number of public and private boards of directors, with current positions at Caregiver Institute, Edufund Inc. (Global Student Loan Corp.), Aequus Technologies, Certification Partners and YourTango.com, among others. He presently serves as Chairman of YourTango.com and Caregiver Institute.
In the non-profit sector, Fingerhut has served as President and now board member of F.E.G.S. Health and Human Services System in New York City. He also serves on the board of overseers for the Stern School of Business at New York University, and as a board member of Achievement/First Corp., an extraordinary Charter School operation in New Haven and New York City.
Fingerhut earned his B.S. degree with distinction from the University of Maryland (1967) and his M.B.A. in Finance/Investments from New York University (1969).
James Stanger, Ph.D.
President and Chief Certification Architect
James Stanger provides vision, direction and technological insight to Certification Partners. He is an evangelist for technology education, and he strives to help Certification Partners achieve its goals to standardize, teach and certify the job skills that employers in the technology market demand.
Stanger personally leads the certification development efforts for Certification Partners. Active in the certification and education industry for the past two decades, he has helped design and develop certification programs for organizations such as IBM, Symantec and CompTIA.
Stanger also writes, lectures and consults worldwide about Web development, e-commerce, social media, network security, convergence/VoIP, open-source technologies and Linux system administration. He sits on advisory councils for various universities, community colleges and companies, including Kaplan University, the American Public University System, Snow College, Mississippi Gulf Coast College and Curriculum Technologies LLC.
Stanger is an accomplished writer, security consultant and Web technologies expert. He has written numerous books for publishers such as O'Reilly, McGraw-Hill, Wiley and Elsevier, and his writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a regular contributor to Ubuntu User and Linux Magazine, as well as to CompTIA's IT Pro Community.
Stanger earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside (1997). You can learn more about James Stanger by visiting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stanger.