Business Professional & Customized Workforce Development

Business Writing Fundamentals

Effective Writing on the Job is a course designed for business people who write email, proposals, business letters and reports to customers, colleagues, and management. Essentially, this course is for YOU---today's business writer.

This course reviews the fundamentals on proper grammar and general tips for better business communication. 

Topics Covered:

1. Common grammar principles
2. Causes of poor writing
3. The writing process
4. Business writing for diverse audiences
5. Persuasive communication---writing to TELL and SELL
6. Revising, editing and proofreading
7. Putting it all together

Project Management/Microsoft Project

Students will learn how to develop project plans and define tasks and resources. Students will detail, track and report the progress of projects. 

Skills learned in the course include: Creating task lists,durations, phases; linking tasks, documenting tasks and project plans; setting up resources, capacity, cost pay rates, documenting; assigning resources to tasks, scheduling, applying cost resources to tasks; sharing your plan, Grant Charts, Timeline views, reporting; tracking progress on tasks, project baselines, task completion percentage; troubleshooting time, schedule, cost, resource, scope of work problems.

This course will help you make better spending choices, develop a financial plan, understand where others make mistakes, and get more comfortable with many investment options you have with your savings. Specific topics to be covered include understanding stocks, bonds, interest rates and credit cards. It will also help you reflect on your own self-control as it concerns your individual spending habits.

Requirements for this course: Internet access and computer, microphone and webcam. 

This course will be taught remotely using Webex.

Prerequisites: Basic Windows, keyboard and mouse skills.

Moving into a management role and need to know how to manage your team? Used to managing others but are at a loss on how to manage today's worker? Not sure how to get your team to work together? Tired of the chaos and negativity of your team? This course can help you weed through why people work in certain ways and why they don't. This course will cover:

• Why you need to get generations of workers to work together
• The generations that are found in today's workforce
• The ideas and concepts that matter to each generation
• Why diversity and inclusion are essential
• Techniques to effectively manage and motivate each group
• Methods to get people of different generations to work toward a common goal (if not a team, then an effective group)

What does leadership mean? What style should you use? Is trusting yourself to lead holding you back? Were you thrown into leadership and have learned it by fire? Would you be a better leader if you knew more about leadership? This course will cover:

• Why leadership is more important than ever
• The benefits of effective leadership
• Assess your current leadership style and techniques
• An overview of various leadership techniques
• How to learn to trust yourself to lead others
• Implement leadership from where you currently are and make a plan for continuous improvement

The Art of Positive Assertiveness

This course is designed to provide you with information regarding your own assertiveness level. It will review techniques on improving your personal assertiveness and confidence through activities and role play.

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Review methods to stand up for your own personal rights
• Discuss ways to express thoughts, feelings and beliefs in direct, honest and appropriate ways
• Discuss the characteristics of personality types
• List the effects of being unassertive and review roadblocks to assertiveness
• Use personal assessments and role playing techniques to increase your assertiveness skills
• Review types of assertion
• Discuss techniques to avoid when dealing with others
• Review communicating, negotiating, receiving criticism and giving criticism with assertiveness
• Discuss dealing with disappointments and your emotional reaction to them

Effective Teambuilding

It takes as strong team leader to build group cooperation and teamwork with so many unique individuals, and it takes an understanding of what the team needs from each other and from the leader. This session focuses on your role as a team leader. You'll learn what it takes to provide your team with the leadership, motivation, and guidance it needs to succeed.

At the end of this session participant's will be able to:

• Assess your team's performance
• develop and share ideas for promoting feelings of achievement and belonging in your team members
• Examine Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and developing a list of practical motivators that you can use with your employees based on Maslow's theory.
• Develop and share ideas for what you can do as a team leader to maximize performance as your team moves through the four stages in team development
• Evaluate your leadership skills and creating a personal action for change

Developing Emotional Intelligence for Managers and Supervisors

This course is designed to provide you with information regarding your own emotional intelligence level. How to improve your social skills, emotional control, flexibility, optimism, and overall ability to deal with conflicts between people. Acquiring or improving on emotional intelligence will make you a better communicator and manager.

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Describe the benefits and challenges of applying emotional intelligence
• Review what makes a person emotionally intelligent
• Obtain tools for assessing individual and organizational strengths and opportunities for improvement
• Assess why strategies regarding dealing with people are important
• Learn the core skills needed for emotional intelligence
• Assess their own emotional intelligence level
• Discuss the five emotional intelligence skills
• Review thinking smart strategies
• Prepare mental scripts
• Practice optimistic thinking
• Discuss social skills, emotional control and flexibility
• Assess organizational self-awareness
• Encourage flexibility and problem solving
• Model and encourage emotional control
• Understand model strategies and examples for using emotional intelligence in business and social settings and also with family and friends.

Know a little bit about Emotional Intelligence, but would like to know how to use it successfully with your employees and co-worker's? As the workforce changes, the need for emotional intelligence management is getting greater and greater. Learn how emotional intelligence has changed and how using it can make your life as a manager easier.

This course will cover:

• Why you need to become emotionally intelligent
• Why emotional intelligence is essential in today's work environment and with today's workforce
• How effective managers and leaders use emotional intelligence
• The connection between emotional intelligence and diversity and inclusion
• Techniques for implementing emotional intelligence with your team

This course will explore best practices for tracking finances, managing payroll, processing invoices, controlling inventory, managing sales and expenses, and maximizing the software's other features. 

Requirement's for this course: Internet access and computer. Microphone and webcam needed for live audio/video training. 

This course will be taught using Webex. The instructor will contact students with further instructions one to three business days prior to class.

Prerequisites: Basic Windows, keyboard and mouse skills.

Effective Leadership Techniques for Women

This session is designed to help women assess their current leadership skills and improve those that they see as needing the most improvement. It stresses confidence, power and the natural skills that women bring to leadership. The session also helps women become more successful dealing with conflicts, interactions that make them feel powerless and dealing with difficult people. Techniques for way to manage conflicting priorities are also discussed.

At the end of this session participants will be able to:

• Gain respect through the effective use of power
• Become authoritative, self-possessed and in control
• Become more assertive in your use of decision-making and problem solving
• Discuss the benefits and skills that women bring to leadership
• Practice effective techniques for dealing with difficult people and conflicts
• Become better at managing conflicting priorities
• Use practice activities to make yourself more powerful