Cultivating Relationships with Your Peers
Developing and maintaining relationships with your peers at work can lead to success for both you as an individual, and within your organization. Networking skills and building supportive peer relationships can provide you with a wide variety of experiences, expertise, and institutional knowledge.
Whether your exploring executive networking, professional networking, or just general business networking, this course explains how ton identify the people in your organization who are important in helping you reach your goals. You’ll learn the skills that maintain solid, mutually beneficial relationships so you can advance your career.
30 Minutes
- Identify key benefits of being aware of your working environment
- Classify the political styles of individuals in the workplace
- Recognize the benefits of identifying key peers
- Identify the characteristics of key peers
- Choose examples of effective steps to build strategic peer relationships
- Describe how to keep your peer relationships healthy
Building Your Professional Network
When you’re serious about advancing your career, you need to build strong professional relationships and maintain an effective network of contacts.
Whether it’s for executive networking or general business networking, this course covers the essential communication and professional networking skills needed to establish a solid network.
It includes strategies for building rapport with new contacts during networking opportunities and covers best practices for maintaining your network so that business contacts can help you achieve your career goals.
40 Minutes
- Identify ways in which a business network is important
- Recognize where to find networking opportunities
- Identify best practices for attracting new network connections
- Match strategies for conversing with new people to appropriate examples
- Recognize strategies you can use to maintain your business network
- Utilize appropriate techniques to start your own business network
Building Rapport with Your Boss
The relationship between you and your boss is a key factor in your career. Careful relationship management will make your job more enjoyable. You’ll find that to work more effectively with your boss, you need to develop a rapport and good networking skills.
Managing up can help you find enjoyment and reward in your current position.In this course, you’ll learn the importance of managing relationships, and ways to build great boss relationships by recognizing their agenda and management style.
You’ll also learn strategies for building a strong professional relationship with your boss, and about various ways you can become aligned with your boss.
50 Minutes
- Recognize the benefits of a building a strong relationship with your boss
- Identify methods to build a successful relationship with your boss
- Determine the best methods of assisting your boss’s agenda
- Match management styles to associated characteristics
- Identify best practices for adapting to your boss’s working style
- Sequence examples of the steps for giving appropriate feedback to your boss
- Use appropriate techniques to start your own business network
Bridging the Diversity Gap
Without a diverse workforce, organizations run the risk of viewing things from a very limited perspective. The organization provides the structure for operation, but it’s the individuals within that organization who carry out the mission of the organization.
To get the most innovative solutions from the individuals in your business, you need to create a workplace that embraces inclusion and avoids bias and stereotyping.
This course focuses on what diversity is and how to leverage the diversity within the organization. You’ll also explore the barriers, such as unconscious bias, that must be overcome to create a diversified and inclusive working environment.
40 Minutes
- Identify key concepts related to diversity in the workplace
- Match the approaches organizations use to deal with diversity to appropriate actions
- Identify how companies can benefit by embracing diversity
- Recognize how prejudice and stereotypes can cause barriers for some employees in the workplace
- Recognize the implications of cultural expectations on diversity in the workplace
- Identify reasons organizations may encounter resistance to diversity in the workplace
- Recognize the importance of workplace diversity and the barriers that must be overcome to embrace its benefits
Your Role in Workplace Diversity
To understand and appreciate diversity in the workplace, you must develop a deep understanding of yourself, as well as any unconscious bias you may have. Your ability to use a variety of strategies to effectively deal with diverse situations is very important.
Equally important is the ability to share these effective strategies openly and leverage the diversity that exists within an inclusive organization.
In this course, you’ll explore how to become aware of your attitudes toward diversity, understand the source of any cultural bias you may have, and increase your acceptance of diverse cultures, people, and ideas. You’ll also discover how to become an advocate for diversity and inclusion within the workplace.
50 Minutes
- Recognize the actions you can take to become aware of your values and beliefs
- Recognize how to adjust your self-talk to manage your reactions in challenging situations involving diversity
- Recognize guidelines for embracing social and cultural diversity in the workplace
- Recognize how your actions can improve social and cultural diversity
- Sequence the steps in the process for implementing a flexible communication style
- Recognize methods to improve your active listening skills
- Recognize attributes of inclusive language
- Develop your own capabilities to embrace and leverage diversity in your workplace
Managing Pressure and Stress to Optimize Your Performance
People react to high pressure differently. Learning to cope with pressure and handling stress are very important, because you don’t want pressure to have a negative impact on your performance.
In this course, you’ll learn about managing stress and pressure, situations that trigger pressure, and how pressure can become stress. You’ll also look at how stress affects you emotionally and physically, and how to respond to it.
And you’ll also learn strategies for managing stress by ensuring you have the right attitude, taking control under pressure, and using performance management to cultivate a “”success mentality.”” You can then optimize your own performance, and prepare to cope with stressed colleagues.
40 Minutes
- Identify the triggers of pressure in the workplace
- Categorize the symptoms of stress
- Match activities to the steps for managing reactions to stress
- Sequence the steps for changing your perception of a situation in order to reduce stress
- Recognize the steps for taking action in high-pressure situations
- Recognize actions for avoiding over analysis and overconfidence
- Match work-style types to the reactions they exhibit when under pressure
- Recognize guidelines for dealing with stress in colleagues
Developing a Plan to Further Your Career
The whole notion of what a career is has changed. You are now responsible for managing your career. And the straightest path toward your goal is not always clear.
In this course, you’ll learn how to take an inventory of your values, interests, skills, and lifestyle aspirations in order to develop your career management skills. You’ll also learn strategies for identifying your strengths and dealing with weaknesses.
Then you’ll learn how to pull it all together and develop a career plan based on your attributes and what you want to achieve. This course also provides tips on how to deal with any weaknesses that are holding you back.
50 Minutes
- Identify the types of questions you should ask to evaluate your current career situation
- Identify how to pinpoint your strengths
- Recognize ways to address your weaknesses
- Identify the types of questions you should ask to develop a vision for your future career
- Match the methods for correcting deficiencies in your career goals with examples
- Identify the steps involved in setting a time line
- Use techniques to develop a career plan
Getting Your Career on the Right Track
Are you happy in your job? Or drifting along without a career plan? Either way, being proactive about where your career is heading is a good start. Exploring your career options is an important part of managing your career.
In this course, you’ll learn how to develop your career management skills and give your career a boost. You’ll get tips on improving career prospects and moving within your current company.
You’ll learn how to use a promotion plan and explore the best ways to ask for assignments that will move your career forward. And you’ll find out how to make a break and move on.
50 Minutes
- Recognize strategies for identifying internal advancement and development opportunities
- Identify considerations for making a lateral move within your organization
- Sequence the steps for creating and implementing a promotion plan
- Recognize the benefits of having a promotion plan
- Identify examples of strategies for successfully asking for assignments that will advance your career
- Recognize ways to successfully move on to a different employer
- Use strategies to manage your career and keep it on the right track
Using Performance Appraisals to Advance Your Career
Many people don’t always recognize the growth opportunities they are presented with by getting feedback.
This course will explain how to manage the performance appraisal process to your benefit. You’ll be given tips for listening to and applying feedback so you can use your formal and informal performance appraisals to your best advantage.
It also outlines how to implement the periodic appraisal strategy to move your career forward, and ways to recognize and use constructive criticism for self-development.
50 Minutes
- Identify the differences between periodic and annual appraisals
- Match features to the relevant appraisal type – monthly or quarterly
- Recognize the opportunities your annual performance appraisal presents
- Identify how to prepare for a performance appraisal
- Recognize the importance of being open to receiving constructive criticism
- Recognize examples of effectively using constructive criticism to seek corrective action
- Match the strategies for presenting your accomplishments at an appraisal to their attributes
- Use strategies that help a performance appraisal advance your career
Power Up: Turning on Your Self-starter Potential
Self-starters take initiative, work without supervision, and begin projects independently. Organizations are always looking for people who come to the table with creative ideas, who find work that needs to be done and do it without waiting to be told.
But self-starters also gain personal benefits from being someone who takes responsibility for their own happiness, the success of their work and relationships, the morale of their workplace, and their life.
In this course, you’ll learn the characteristics that most self-starters have in common, and why they are valued as employees and as leaders. You’ll also learn the skills you need to build or enhance your own self-starting toolbox, the barriers you may encounter on the path to being a self-starter, and strategies to overcome those challenges.
40 Minutes
- Discover the key concepts covered in this course
- Identify the characteristics of self-starters
- Recognize how being a self-starter will help you in any job
- Identify behaviors that reflect an internal or external locus of control
- Identify tools to strengthen your self-starting skills
- Identify strategies for overcoming barriers to becoming a self-starter
- Knowledge Check: Assessing Your Skills as a Self-starter
