Communication & Collaboration   

Course Overview 

You stare at your screen, editing the same sentence over and over. Is it clear enough? Persuasive enough? Professional enough? 

In today's fast-paced, tech-driven workplace, strong writing skills--combined with smart use of AI tools--can give you a serious advantage. This hands-on, 1-day intensive workshop helps you level up your professional writing, streamline your individual process, and confidently craft emails, reports, proposals and more. You'll also learn how to use AI to jumpstart drafts, improve clarity, and save time--without sacrificing your unique voice. 

Bring your own writing sample to get expert feedback and walk away with practical techniques you can use immediately. 

Learning Outcomes

• Identify the core principles of clear, professional communication across written and verbal formats.
• Understand their own communication habits and identify areas for improvement in tone, clarity, and style.
• Use AI tools to draft, refine, and enhance professional written communication (e.g., emails) more efficiently.
• Apply plain language techniques to simplify complex information for a variety of professional audience
• Bring your own communication sample to get expert feedback and walk away with practical techniques you can use immediately.

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is ideal for professionals in communications, marketing, project management, HR, administration and anyone who wants to write with greater confidence, clarity and efficiency---whether solo or with AI support. 

What to Bring

A 1-2 page writing sample from your job or professional life. No sample? No problem--you can bring a mock or past writing piece for review. 

Course Overview 

Performance Management in an organization is a systematic approach to ensure employees' work performance (activities and outputs) as well as their overall competencies (technical skill and soft skills) align with the overall strategic business goals. It involves setting clear expectations, monitoring progress, providing feedback, and fostering employee development to improve individual and organizational performance.

Key Learning:

• Goal Setting: How to define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives that align to organizational goals
• Feedback & Coaching: Providing on-going feedback, both formal and informal to recognize achievements and address areas for improvement
• Performance Evaluation: How to conduct periodic assessments, on a regular cadence to formally review employee contributions
• Development & Improvement: When and how to offer career development opportunities, or corrective actions to improve skills and performance.
• Recognition & Rewards: How to acknowledge high performers to motivate and retain talent

Who Should Attend?

This course is designed for HR professionals and People leaders to better understand their role in the performance management process 

Additional Information

This course is part of the Certificate Program in Human Resource Management. It is recommended that Intro to Human Resources Management be taken before the other courses in the HR Certificate but it is not required to do so.

Mindfulness is about being centered in the middle of life which brings with it calm and chaos. This class is for beginners or a renewal for the more advanced. Mindfulness is a life-long journey.

Objectives: 

• Practicing being centered in calm and chaos
• Learning Mindfulness exercises for self
• Learning Mindfulness exercises for patients and students

Course Description:

Teaches strategies for influencing and guiding others when you lack formal positional power, emphasizing relationship-building and persuasive communication.

Learning Goals:

1. Build trust and credibility.
2. Develop persuasive communication skills.
3. Drive initiatives across cross-functional teams.

Course Description:

Equips professionals with the tools to manage workplace conflicts constructively, transforming disagreements into opportunities for collaboration and growth.

Learning Goals: 

1. Recognize sources of conflict.
2. Employ effective de-escalation techniques.
3. Foster a collaborative team environment.

Course Overview 

Let's take a close look at the employment life cycle starting with what happens before recruitment begins and ends after employment terminates.  In this workshop, we will focus on key management challenges, common gaps in talent management strategy, employment culture, employee experience, performance management, role modeling leadership behaviors, and employment termination.

Learning Objectives

• Methods to recruit and retain individuals who like what your organization has to offer
• Checking references and giving references the right way
• How to ensure your employee personnel file documentation is defensible
• Engaging employees and retaining your high performers
• Terminating the employment relationship with dignity 

Who Should Attend? 

This program is designed for human resources professionals and those individuals with responsibility for acquiring, motivating, and retaining talent. 

Additional Information

This course is part of the Certificate Program in Human Resource Management. It is recommended that Intro to Human Resources Management be taken before the other courses in the HR Certificate but it is not required to do so.

Course Overview 

Are you experiencing changes in your workplace? Does it sometimes feel like change is happening to you rather than for you?

As the pace and volume of organizational change continue to increase, having the right tools and frameworks can make all the difference. In this course, you'll learn practical techniques to recognize and release resistance, strengthen your confidence, and reduce the fear associated with transformation.

This course explores the why, what, and how of change, offering proven strategies for navigating transitions with greater clarity and purpose. Through real-world examples and hands-on practice, you will develop skills that empower you to engage with change more effectively.

Learning Goals:

• Understand the why behind organizational changes
• Describe what organizational change is - using the change curve
• Develop strategies for how to navigate changes in the workplace 

Who Should Attend?

This course is ideal for professional at all levels of an organization, across a wide variety of fields of industry and the arts. 

Additional Information

This 3 hour live-online course can serve as one leadership elective for certificate courses in the Professional Development Programs.

Course Overview 

Giving feedback is a necessary and important part of workplace relationships, whether you are working with a peer, manager, staff member or customer. Learn how to turn a situation that many times ends in defensiveness or anger into a positive conversation that strengthens the working relationship and contributes to increased productivity.

Learning Objectives:

• Differentiate between fact and opinion
• Avoid using verbal hooks that lead to defensiveness and anger
• Respond to challenging rebuttals and diffuse tension
• Stay focused and on-track during the feedback conversation

We recommend, but it is not required, that students start the supervision program with Stepping Up to Supervisor followed by Using Feedback Effectively. This course is part of the Certificate Program in Supervision.

Who Should Attend?

This program is designed for entry- to mid-level supervisors and managers, small business owners, technical staff, and individuals interested in leadership roles.

Course Description:

In the routine of each school day, between ringing bells and often over children’s voices, the school staff is in endless and often complicated interaction with other adults. Agility in these communications is prominent in job descriptions, prized in educator evaluation rubrics, and always in the prescription for effective PLC’s and the many school teams. It can also be the difference between lasting productivity and spiraling conflict, and between an educator’s comfortable confidence and exhausting hesitance. Despite the centrality, complicated nature, and universally acknowledged value, these skills are not usually part of an educator’s preparation or ongoing training.

Borrowing relevant lessons from other fields and ageless commentary on the subject, this interactive professional development provides the school staff with a vocabulary and framework through which they might all better understand, navigate, and practice the communications and conversations that are so central to their work. A series of interlocking exercises moves participants through an imagined school day filled with familiar but compelling communication challenges. By the time the afternoon buses depart, they have navigated parents, principals, PLC meetings, and a missing set of pencils. They have conducted conversations in hallways, classrooms, and offices. Their communications also happen over email, text, video, and messaging apps, with FERPA and FOA realities always lurking in the near background.