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. 

This set of 1-hour modules is for anyone who wishes to master the art and mechanics of business writing.  In the first module you will learn how to identify and develop the appropriate message for your readers, discern the best written message for different situations, and recognize the importance of tone and how to convey this in a business message for a certain audience.  Module two will teach you how to recognize sentences that reflect the techniques of clear writing and how to apply these techniques to a given sample of business writing, as well as how to identify ways to organize content to increase reader understanding.  Finally, in the third module, you will learn how to distinguish between editing and proofreading, identify general techniques that help you edit and proofread effectively, and recognize and identify the types of errors made in a given business document.

• Know Your Readers and Your Purpose: comm_19_a01_bs_enus
• How to Write Clearly and Concisely: comm_19_a02_bs_enus
• Editing and Proofreading: comm_19_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.