Did you know that you can get hands-on practice resolving real-world business issues by taking SkillSoft’s Business Challenge Series courses?  These 15-20 minute interactive case studies bring to life problems and solutions for a wide range of sales, business, and professional topics. Gain the full value of the learning experience by immersing yourself in these scenarios in a safe, exploratory environment.  At the end of the course, you’ll receive feedback about your solution and will be invited to try a different solution, acquiring different perspectives and tools that can inform how you apply the concepts in your own workplace situation.

For more information about SkillSoft and the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, contact Jill Weinknecht Wardell at ext. 5-1442 or jwardell@umbc.edu.

Did you know that you can use SkillSoft e-Learning to find short interactive videos that provide solutions to frequently encountered business problems?  These 5-10 minute videos, called Business Impact Series, can be found within the course catalog under the folder ‘Business Exploration Series.’ During these short videos, you will receive background information on the business scenario, watch it being enacted through a dramatization, and receive a specific course of action that you can apply to your own situation.   With over 170+ videos to choose from on topics such as Management, Leadership, Human Resources, Sales, Finance and Accounting, and Professional Foundations, you are bound to find a topic that suits your individual and/or your departmental needs.

For more information about SkillSoft and the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.

Highly successful teams have members who exhibit certain key characteristics, most notably trust in others and a sense of commitment to the team. In the early stages of team development, leaders must set up structures and processes that support the development of these team characteristics. This one-hour course offers strategies used to build trust based on encouraging honest, accountable, fair, and positive behavior. The course also provides leaders with strategies that help increase team member commitment, such as being supportive, making members feel secure, providing interesting work, and acknowledging contributions and achievements. By using these strategies, team leaders can develop a cohesive team that works together to reach its goals.

This is course number:  team_03_a04_bs_enus

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.

For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.

With the hectic pace of contemporary life, time management skills are essential to optimal productivity and stress-reduction. This series of one-hour courses helps you analyze your current use of time, clarify your goals, prioritize your workload, and outline ways to better manage time in accordance with your personality type and energy cycle. You will learn how to prepare useful to-do lists, properly sequence tasks, and estimate time frames so you can meet your deadlines. Additionally, you will learn delegation skills, such as effective task-based communication, techniques to address skills-based delegation problems with employees, and effective practices for dealing with employees who lack confidence and motivation when presented with new tasks.

• Time Management: Analyzing Your Use of Time: pd_11_a01_bs_enus
• Time Management: Planning and Prioritizing Your Time: pd_11_a02_bs_enus
• Delegation Essentials: Overcoming Delegation Problems: mgmt_27_a03_bs_enus

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.

For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.

New managers often have misconceptions about what managing entails, and they may be surprised to learn that the skills and methods required for success as an individual contributor and those needed for success as a manager are very different. This series of courses clarifies the myths and truths about management and describes strategies for dealing with common mistakes. These courses also provide methods for establishing credibility, managing former colleagues effectively, meeting organizational expectations, and balancing conflicting expectations of peers, direct reports, and management.

• First Time Manager: Understanding a Manager's Role: mgmt_16_a01_bs_enus
• First Time Manager: Challenges: mgmt_16_a02_bs_enus
• First Time Manager: Meeting Expectations: mgmt_16_a03_bs_enus

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.

For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.

Getting and keeping your career on track takes careful planning. Approaching your career proactively and being able to recognize opportunities to move ahead are key to smart career management. This course guides you through the process of taking stock of your present situation and determining the best way ahead. It starts with taking inventory of your values, interests, skills, and needs. Then based on these findings, you can determine your strengths. This course provides examples of roles in which you could use those strengths. It also provides tips on how to deal with any weaknesses that are holding you back.

This is course number: pd_10_a01_bs_enus

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.

For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.

This set of 1-hour modules is for those who feel that they are unable to effectively balance their work and their life.

Module 1 highlights techniques you can use to analyze your current level of balance between work and life responsibilities. Only through properly understanding where you are, in relation to where you want to be, can you begin to construct a map that will take you to your objective of a balanced, fulfilled life. Module 2 will focus on techniques for maintaining work/life balance. It includes recognizing the behaviors of passiveness, aggressiveness, and assertiveness and how those affect a person's ability to find balance in life. Module 3 will explain how the signs and symptoms of stress could be of physiological, behavioral, and psychological nature, where these stresses can come from and how to keep them from causing burnout. It also covers how you can positively change your responses to stress once you are able to recognize how you respond to stressful situations and relaxation techniques such as breathing and mediation.

• Analyzing Your Life Balance: pd_06_a01_bs_enus
• Maintaining Your Life Balance: pd_06_a02_bs_enus
• Taking Control of Your Stress: pd_06_a03_bs_enus

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.

For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.

Today's leaders must be able to communicate vision in such a way that the audience is engaged and everyone understands and internalizes the message. Effective leadership communication gives purpose and meaning to the work that people do. Leaders should strive to communicate vision with a sense of integrity, building trust as an individual and as a leader.

This course provides a general introduction to vision communication, including its nature and its purpose. You will be guided through numerous techniques and methods for a leader to successfully communicate vision, such as personalizing and multiplying a clear message, communicating enthusiasm in an authentic way, and making the organization's vision the employees' own vision. Materials designed to support blended learning activities aligned with this course are available from the Resources Page.

This is course number: lead_05_a02_bs_enus

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.

For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.

SkillSoft Topic of the Month: Performance Management Series

This series of courses outlines the five phases of a performance management system: planning, monitoring, improving, reviewing, and rewarding. You will also learn how to monitor and improve your employees' performance using a four-step process that covers setting targets, collecting the necessary information, analyzing that information, and responding to performance gaps that appear, and how to rate employee performance objectively by applying a five-category rating scale. The series provides strategies to prepare yourself and your employee for an annual appraisal meeting, instructs you in how to conduct such a meeting, and gives you an opportunity to practice. Finally, it outlines some principles for developing effective rewards and presents a technique you can use to link compensation to different levels of performance.

• Planning for Performance: mgmt_37_a01_bs_enus
• Monitoring and Improving Performance: mgmt_37_a02_bs_enus
• Reviewing and Rewarding Performance: mgmt_37_a03_bs_enus
Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website for a Quick Start Guide, FAQs, and the link to log in to SkillPort.

For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or hrtraining@umbc.edu.

The course shows you how the essential elements of trust, credibility, and specific confident communication behaviors bring about confident communication and enhance your influence. It highlights the advantages of communicating with confidence, explores the construction of trust and credibility, and clarifies how trust and credibility result in confident communications.

This is course number:  comm_21_a01_bs_enus

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website (link to: www.umbc.edu/skillsoft) for a Quick Start Guide, FAQ’s, and the link to log in to SkillPort. 

For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or e-mail hrtraining@umbc.edu.