Rookie to Rockstar: Mastering Professional Effectiveness

Communicating with confidence is critical to your message being successfully received. Feeling confident in a high stakes situation is not always easy but with effort, confidence can be cultivated and improved. In this course, you'll learn about being an effective speaker. You'll discover ways to prepare, techniques to avoid being nervous and how to use your voice and body language to communicate with self-confidence.

Eighty percent of your day is spent at work. Whether you commute to an office or work from home, to a huge degree your professional success depends on your likability. Think about all your professional interactions; you work on team projects, collaborate on conference calls, sit in meetings, talk to clients, etc. These and more are situations that require your ability to be liked. However, it's not a popularity contest. Being liked doesn't mean you give up your professional integrity. Although it's not possible to be liked by everyone, this course teaches you techniques to be likable and respected by your colleagues and boss. You will also learn how to ‘get over it' when someone in the workplace does not like you.

The many nuances and conventions in the English language make it diverse and interesting; however, when it comes to writing well, they can also cause some difficulties. For better writing skills, you must familiarize yourself with some of the most common errors of usage. In this course, you'll learn how to use commonly confused words correctly, including word pairs that sound alike and those that have related meanings. You'll explore often misused verbs - for example, affect and effect or apprise and appraise - that can impede professional business writing. You'll also learn some idiomatic combinations of verbs and prepositions that can be confusing and will put your communication skills to the test.

Over the course of a career, not everyone you work with will be easy to get along with. Sometimes this presents difficult situations. But whether it's your boss, a peer, direct report, client, or vendor, professionalism, and professional success, rely on overcoming challenging people and be able to work with even those you don't personally care for. It requires using tact. In this course, you'll learn to navigate challenging situations with tact and diplomacy. You'll learn how to get along with co-workers, give feedback to bosses and direct reports, compose tactful emails, and negotiate diplomatically.

Developing and maintaining relationships with your peers at work can lead to success for both you as an individual, and for your organization. A supportive peer network can provide you with a wide variety of expertise and institutional knowledge and enable you to leverage other people's networks. The workplace of today poses some challenges with diversity in workforce and remote teams who are separated physically. In this course, you'll explore how to identify the different peers in your organization who may be important in meeting your goals or may form a support base for you. You'll also learn how to develop and maintain solid, mutually beneficial relationships with the different peers in any environment.

When you're serious about advancing your career, you need to build strong professional relationships and maintain an effective circle of connections. 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. In this course, you'll learn about professional networking skills, including strategies for building rapport with new connections during networking opportunities and best practices for maintaining your network so that your connections can help you achieve professional success.

Your relationship with your manager has a huge impact on both of your careers. Frankly, you depend upon each other for success. Your manager's support, guidance, and direction help you do your job better. And your good work makes your manager look good. Effectively managing this relationship can increase your productivity, help you meet your personal career goals, and last but not least, make your time at work more enjoyable and rewarding. In this course, you will learn the importance of managing relationships, and ways to build great manager relationships by recognizing their agenda and management style. You will also learn strategies for building a strong professional relationship with your manager, and various ways you can become aligned with your manager. You will find that to work more effectively with your manager, you need to develop a rapport and make workplace interactions mutually beneficial (win-win).

Accountability is a mindset - a way of thinking about how to take responsibility for your life and ownership of your decisions. Accountability tends to drive success; it is action-oriented and geared toward constant improvement. In this course, you will learn how to develop a framework for personal accountability. From the foundations of a framework to daily practices and sustained momentum, this course will help you take ownership of your goals and live your values.

What stands between you and success? People who are the best they can be are empowered by a belief that throughout their lives and careers, within their organizations and in their relationships, they can take action to improve their current state. They see themselves as responsible for their own happiness and success. In this course, you'll learn principles and characteristics shared by people who have broken through the barriers holding them back from true success. You'll discover how to identify those barriers - as well as your own personal triggers and mental blocks - and overcome them. You'll also learn strategies to jumpstart your work mindset and to advocate for yourself to get you out of your own way and on a path to success.

Companies often opt to create virtual teams in place of on-site teams. This allows employees to work from home or remote locations. However, if not managed appropriately, remote working may cause breakdowns in communication, collaboration, and teamwork. In this course, you'll learn how to develop the skills you need to show team leadership and be an effective member of a virtual team. You'll explore personal traits that are useful when working on a team remotely. You'll also learn strategies to stay connected with other team members, and ways to manage your time and overcome the challenges associated with managing teams remotely.

Though it's invaluable, getting feedback can sometimes be a difficult process. Adopting a positive mindset can make all the difference. This course will teach you how receiving feedback differs from getting simple praise or criticism. You'll discover how listening to constructive feedback with a positive mindset can help you to manage your reactions and responses. You'll also learn how applying feedback can help your professional growth and self-development.

The word "feedback" might make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Many people think of feedback as a threat. Even positive feedback can seem like an attack. Our egos and self-esteem tell us to shut down and drown it out. But feedback is a necessary part of professional growth and development. With a positive mindset, you can stay calm, take feedback on board, and use it to improve your performance and further your career. In this course, you will explore how receiving feedback differs from receiving simple praise or criticism. You will learn how listening to genuinely constructive feedback with a positive mindset can influence your reactions and responses. You will also learn how applying feedback can catalyze your professional growth and self-development.

To be more productive, you can keep your Outlook emails well organized in different ways, for example deleting old emails. This course lets you discover how to use folders to manage your inbox and search for emails. You will also learn how to handle junk email, archive emails and create email rules.

The amount of time available to you is constant - you can't buy more and you can't save it for later. However, by managing your time, you can increase your productivity. And the better you understand your own personal productivity, the easier it will be to manage your time effectively. In this course, you'll learn about how you can use task management to maximize your productivity. You'll discover the benefits of using time management and assessing the value of your tasks. You'll learn about benefits of setting goals and how productivity is tied to your ability to assess time and set priorities. And you'll also learn about the process of "chunking" your time and how to use different types of to-do lists effectively.

Even when you know your priorities and have an organized time management routine, you'll still be challenged every day by distractions, temptations, interruptions, and procrastination. To avoid causing internal time management detours, you have to develop ways to stay focused, and this often means using personal and interpersonal skills in very specific ways. In this course, you'll learn strategies to manage challenges to your personal focus, techniques to help you shut out distractions and manage time conflicts, and ways to regain focus and develop mental resilience when faced with change.

When struggling with a difficult problem, it's easy to become hemmed in by traditional habitual thinking. Learning to leverage the power of analogical thinking allows you to think creatively and gain fresh insights through the exploration of unexpected similarities. In this course, you'll learn what analogical thinking is, when it's best used, and how to use it. You'll also learn under what situations it can fail, and how to avoid superficial analogies so you can make better strategic choices.

Apart from conversing in channels, Microsoft Teams allows you to communicate privately with your colleagues in multiple ways. In this course, you will see how to send private messages to one or several people, as a group. All these messages and conversations can be easily managed. Along with messages, you will also see how to make audio and video calls. During these calls, you will be able to share content, use subtitles and even change your background. Finally, if your colleague is not available, learn how to leave a voicemail message.

Microsoft Teams is an excellent tool for organizing meetings with your colleagues all over the world. In this course, you will see how to create, schedule, and join meetings. Being the creator of the meeting, you can always edit its details, make it recurrent and manage its participants. If you have a large number of attendees, learn how to use breakout rooms in order to make teamwork more efficient. Collaboration is easy during meetings: use the whiteboard, share content, take notes, and record the meeting for further reference.

Developing emotional intelligence is a key to successful leadership. Leaders with a strong mixture of emotional awareness, self-management, and social skills are able to relate better to those around them. Emotionally intelligent leaders navigate relationships more effectively and are more likely to be successful in their personal and professional lives. This course provides an understanding of why emotionally intelligent leadership is important. It also provides practical, positive techniques for promoting and improving emotional intelligence as a leader within your business environment.

Especially in times of disruption and change, your health and wellness - both physical and mental - can sometimes take a backburner to urgent and pressing needs. Prioritizing your wellness can be life-changing on a personal level, with the added benefits to employers of increased productivity, employee engagement, and retention. In this course, you'll learn to identify the elements of well-being at work and understand how common work and home factors can cause wellness to go out of balance. You'll also learn how to recognize signs of stress in yourself and in others, and what strategies help build resilience and promote wellness in all of life's dimensions: at work and at home; in mind, body, and human connections.

Psychological safety involves the feeling of being accepted and respected-believing you can present your true self at work without fear of negative consequences to your self-image, status, or career. But it also goes beyond that to trusting that your team and your workplace is safe for interpersonal risk taking, which is crucial to being in an energized workplace of learners and problem solvers. When there's a high level of psychological safety, there is a culture of inclusion. People feel safe to speak up, to offer ideas, and to ask questions. At the very core of psychological safety is a mindset that welcomes diversity of thought, whether it brings good news, bad news, or a puzzle. In this course, you'll learn what psychological safety is and the big impact it has in the workplace, and how to nurture a mindset of psychological safety and build a skillset that supports it. And you'll learn what challenges might inhibit a culture of psychological safety, solutions for overcoming each challenge, and techniques to measure and sustain high levels of psychological safety in your workplace.

"Who can I trust around here?" This is a more common workplace question than most of us might like to admit. Building relationships and trust within professional networks is done like a mason building a wall - one stone at a time. Trust is a core ingredient in positive relationships. Without it, the mason's wall takes on a whole new analogy - a barrier, with no gate for entry. In this course, you'll explore trust - what makes you and others trustworthy, how to demonstrate trustworthiness through your own professional accountability, and how to fix a trust deficit after trust has been broken.