Business Skills

How do you build strong networks within your company and among industry peers? How do you communicate effectively with different types of people in the workplace and get your point across clearly? This series will help you build bridges and improve your business relationships.

The Business Ethics series provides a common sense, practical approach to doing good work, emphasizing the need for people to prepare in advance for ethical dilemmas. The series takes an honest, realistic view of how managers can help improve ethical behavior in the rushed, output-driven business environment.

Series Package

Finding a new job in today's market is tough to do. These courses will give you the helping hand you need, with advice on resumes, interviewing, persuasion, and managing your career, your confidence, and your time. Courses on the latest versions of Excel, Outlook, and Word are also included to help keep your computer skills up-to-date.

Prepare for your Certified Business Analysis Professional™ certification and learn everything you need to pass the exam on your first try! This study guide series is based on the BABOK® Guide v2.0, and topics include requirement planning, management, elicitation and analysis, solution assessment and validation, and underlying fundamentals. Practice exams are part of the series, containing questions using the same format as the exam and including in-depth instructional feedback.

A successful leader encourages and guides employee development. Our coaching programs will teach you to become a mentor to your employees, helping them to make career decisions, acquire new skills and enhance professional performance.

Most people's jobs include working with a lot of people who are coworkers from across the company (or even from other companies). Many times, doing your job properly depends upon other people doing the things or having the information you need. How can you persuade, influence, and inform other people in ways that will make things happen? This series will talk about how to spark action and motivation from others, especially ones who are not in a direct line of command with you.

Effective communication sets the foundation for individual and organizational success. When you master effective communication skills, you gain a great deal of power - the power to get things done. Our communication programs focus on building the key skills you need to communicate successfully.

This series will give you the study guide you need for the CompTIA A+ Essentials exam, which is the first of two exams now required to earn CompTIA A+ certification. This certification validates the knowledge and skills of entry-level computer service technicians. It is an international, vendor-neutral certification recognized by major hardware and software vendors, distributors and resellers. CompTIA A+ certification confirms a technician's ability to perform tasks such as installation, configuration, diagnosing, preventive maintenance and basic networking.

Keeping computer data secure is one of the keystone needs of any organization. This certification validates the information security knowledge and skills of any IT professional. It is an international, vendor-neutral certification recognized by major hardware and software vendors, distributors and resellers. This study guide will prepare you to perform system and network security assessments and respond to security weaknesses and breaches. Practice exams are also included, which will allow you to answer questions in the same format that the test will use on exam day, and will provide in-depth instructional feedback on each question to thoroughly cover every subject you'll need to master.

This series examines several basic computing concepts. Security issues are discussed, including administrative, physical, logical, and network security, and how to plan for security risks. The basic concepts of database functionality and selection are also discussed. Data processing and management is examined in detail, including teleprocessing, data transmission, and messages.

This series introduces users to Crystal Reports 8, a popular database reporting program. In this series, you will learn how to create standard and custom reports. You will also learn how to filter, summarize, sort, group, and manipulate data by inserting formulas and functions.

Do you need to know the foundations of Crystal Reports XI? Do you want to create reports that sizzle from one or more data sources ASAP? This series will show you how to create, format, and deliver reports that get results in no time. You will learn everything from the basics of getting around in Crystal's report design environment to the subtle nuances of effective report formatting and data visualization through charting and mapping.

This series is designed to help users create and maintain good customer services. Concepts covered include defining company-wide customer service and standards, strategies for effective communication, and effective problem resolution. The series also provides an overview of creating a customer service department that useful tools for providing excellent customer service.

Knowing what your customers really need is the key to providing high quality customer service. Being accessible, listening to concerns and resolving problems are fundamental when building customer loyalty. Our programs will help you develop the skills to achieve total customer satisfaction.

This series presents strategies for handling interpersonal tension in the workplace. In each course, learners will gain insight into analyzing situations, determining the best courses of action, and resolving problems. Scenarios and examples include working with difficult people in any organizational situation - supervisors, peers, and subordinates.

In everyday business, it?s more and more common to meet, hold conference calls, and travel overseas. When you?re working with people from an unfamiliar country, how can you gain the knowledge to ensure smooth communication and to avoid an offensive faux pas? Our Doing Business In? courses will quickly give you the background to confidently reach across any cultural divide. In the Doing Business in China course, you will be introduced to the culture of China, including greetings, business meetings, and dining. Each lesson includes a video overview to quickly present the most important facts.

In everyday business, it?s more and more common to meet, hold conference calls, and travel overseas. When you?re working with people from an unfamiliar country, how can you gain the knowledge to ensure smooth communication and to avoid an offensive faux pas? Our Doing Business In? courses will quickly give you the background to confidently reach across any cultural divide. In the Doing Business in India course, you will be introduced to the culture of India, including greetings, business meetings, and dining. Each lesson includes a video overview to quickly present the most important facts.

E-mail has become so prevalent in the workplace that we seldom think about it, and yet it is the medium coworkers see you through most often. How can your e-mails speak for you clearly, effectively, and potently? This series will walk you through building e-mail subject lines and messages that are effective and respect office etiquette. You'll also learn about e-mail safety by avoiding threats like viruses and phishing, and how to think about email confidentiality and legal security.

This series teaches the writing skills learners will need to effectively communicate in a business setting. They'll learn how to prepare for a writing task, and about strategies and skills for effective word choice, sentence building, and paragraph design.

Public speaking is a frightening task to many people, but it's also a crucial tool in career success. This series offers tips to help you prepare and deliver more powerful presentations.

The Fundamentals of Business Management series provides learners with basic theories, skills, and tools they can use to improve their performance as managers.

It is dangerous to assume that business and communication practices do not vary across cultures. Our global business programs will familiarize you with cultural differences in business styles and prepare you to communicate effectively on a global level.

Creativity can do more than just spark the next Big Idea for your organization. It?s also a critical skill for finding unique solutions to problems and new ways to improve on old processes. This series will help you to build your creativity and encourage it in others in productive ways that help your organization?s bottom line.

This series will teach the learner the basics of the instructional design process. Learners will discover how to identify the need for instruction and analyze the content to be taught. Best practices for designing, planning, implementing, and evaluating instruction will help prepare the learner to create instructional programs.

There are well over 100 million web sites on the Internet. How can you make yours stand out among such a huge crowd? How can your site attract the notice of your audience and of the search engines that your audience will use? This series will put powerful, simple tools in your hands to give your web site its own voice and to carve out its place on the Internet.

When leaders create and communicate their vision, inspire others, implement strategy and champion change, organizations thrive. Our programs will help you enhance your leadership ability to create an environment of trust, credibility and integrity

Roadmap Package

Get a full year of access to a set of courses designed to build your organizational skills, people skills, and personal skills.

The MindLeaders Leadership Roadmap™ identifies 21 leadership skills in three competency fields: Personal Skills, People Skills and Organizational Skills.

Personal Skills - Learn the skills that will make a great leader. Integrity and values, time management and career management.

People Skills - Leaders do more than manage their employees, they inspire, motivate and encourage them to grow. Learn skills such as project management, team management, listening, conflict resolution and more.

Organizational Skills - To lead a team, leaders must first understand their place in the organization as a whole. This portion of the Leadership Roadmap™ will teach recruitment, retention, succession planning, diversity and other business essential skills.

See the Leadership Roadmap Page for additional details.

Strong, cohesive teams are vital corporate assets and instrumental in achieving a variety of business goals. Our leading teams programs will teach you how to create, motivate and manage various types of teams to boost productivity and achieve positive results.

Never before has your contribution as a manager been more important to your organization. This means you are going to have to lead as well as to manage. You need to hire, develop, motivate and retain the right talent. If you're an experienced manager on the move or a new manager, you need answers and solutions, and you need them now. That's what our management programs are all about.

The Management Skills Introduction series teaches learners core management skills. Learners will be able to apply their knowledge to the successful management of projects, people, and time.

Change is an undeniable aspect of today's business world. The leaders of an organization are called upon to guide their teams through the change process and to provide a critical bridge between the old way of doing things and new work practices. This series shows managers the three major elements of leadership in times of significant change -- the need to refocus yourself, to lead the team, and to work effectively with individual team members.

There are a myriad of laws and regulations governing workplace issues such as discrimination, harassment and the hiring and dismissal of employees. Our managing within the law programs will help protect you and your employees by educating you about the laws that must guide policy and behavior in the workplace.

This series will prepare you for the MCTS: Microsoft Office Project 2007, Managing Projects exam. This exam is the only requirement to apply for the Technology Specialist: Managing Projects with Microsoft Office Project 2007 certification and will give you credit toward a Microsoft Certified IT Professional: Enterprise Project Management with Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 certification. This study guide will prepare you to create, manage, and report on projects. Practice exams are also included, which will allow you to answer questions in the same format that the test will use on exam day, and will provide in-depth instructional feedback on each question to thoroughly cover every subject you'll need to master.

This series presents the concepts of providing motivation for employees. It discusses developing a vision, a common goal, and direction for workers. Topics covered include using effective communication, conducting effective meetings, and encouraging creative problem-solving. The series also discusses rewarding effort and correcting mistakes without damaging motivation. Other topics examined include time and stress management, training and education and motivation, and building trust. This series is designed for those interested in improving their skills in coaching and motivating employees.

This series provides insight for motivating team members in the workplace. Learners will understand principles for leading and coaching employees and will discover methods of motivating a team through rewarding top performers, correcting weaker performers, and building trust. Learners also will become familiar with established psychological theories that support these motivational strategies.

This series presents strategies for negotiating in business and daily situations. It covers techniques for developing a negotiation plan, evaluating the opposition, and taking advantage of body language, props, timing, questions, and correspondence. It presents strategies for gaining control in negotiation situations, and effective methods of getting past obstacles and closing a negotiation. Several everyday negotiation scenarios are explored, with tips for effective negotiation techniques to apply to these situations.

Combined Collection (Business and Technical). See links for details.

Library Package

The Reference Library features a current selection of electronic full-text copies of published print materials. Its fully searchable electronic books can supply on-the-fly, how-to information or add depth to supplement an existing training program.

• Search for a book you want by title, author, keyword, or even by searching the full text of the entire library.
• The navigation in the book allows you to flip pages, jump to specific chapters or sections, or search the book for words or phrases to jump to.
• Save favorite books and passages for quick return later.
• Print a valuable page or passage for handy reference.
• Want to return to a book to continue reading later? The Reference Library will remember the page you left and return you to it.
• Need to look up a term on the fly? The Reference Library includes instant access from any page to the American Heritage Dictionary.

Business Collection. See link for details. A Combination Business and Technical Collection is also available.

Library Package

The Reference Library features a current selection of electronic full-text copies of published print materials. Its fully searchable electronic books can supply on-the-fly, how-to information or add depth to supplement an existing training program.

• Search for a book you want by title, author, keyword, or even by searching the full text of the entire library.
• The navigation in the book allows you to flip pages, jump to specific chapters or sections, or search the book for words or phrases to jump to.
• Save favorite books and passages for quick return later.
• Print a valuable page or passage for handy reference.
• Want to return to a book to continue reading later? The Reference Library will remember the page you left and return you to it.
• Need to look up a term on the fly? The Reference Library includes instant access from any page to the American Heritage Dictionary.

Technical Collection. See link for details. A Combination Business and Technical Collection is also available.

Office 2007 includes the latest version of PowerPoint, the presentation creation package that helps add visual impact and dynamic information to your presentations. This series will walk you through creating your own presentations.

Get projects under control with Microsoft Project?s latest version, 2007. Build schedules, communicate effectively with everyone involved, chart your progress, and keep track of budget and project materials. This series will show you how to use this complex tool to save time and maximize your projects? success.

This series provides a detailed examination of project management concepts and strategies. It discusses the seven components of a management system and the five phases of the project life cycle, and looks at factors that affect cost and quality. The project manager's role is explored in detail, and strategies for defining the project are examined. Tasks such as developing the Work Breakdown Structure, estimating and scheduling resources, scheduling computations, and tracking project activities are discussed. The close-out phase of a project is also covered. Other topics include formalizing project management standards, developing a project team, and strategies for becoming a more effective project manager.

This series goes beyond the basic mechanics of project management and focuses on the people side of getting projects accomplished. It helps you develop a deeper understanding of interpersonal dynamics that can make you more effective in leading a project team. Look to this series for topics such as building a team, leading a team, influencing team members across departments, communicating, documenting, and balancing multiple projects.

The more important a project, the more it needs a standardized system to plan and organize it to be completed efficiently. The Project Management Institute?s PMP (Project Management Professional) certification is the industry-leading standard for verifying a project manager?s ability to successfully shepherd projects from beginning to end. This study guide will prepare you to initiate, plan, execute, monitor, control, and close a project using project quality standards as laid out in the fourth edition of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). This series of courses will address all the objectives needed to pass the Project Management Professional Certification 2009.

Roadmap Package

Get a full year of access to a set of courses designed to deliver just the right amount of project management training for whatever level of project management you are at.

Project Managers are the heart of any company. They push the projects through, managing time, resources and expectations...keeping the focus of the various stakeholders and developers on task. It is a multi-faceted discipline, which is why MindLeaders has gathered a wide variety of courses together into the Project Management Roadmap. This collection of over 50 courses has been put together to teach everything from team leadership to managing meetings to delegating tasks.

Manage Your Projects - Learn the core project management skills, such as project execution and quality managment to estimating and scheduling resources.

Facilitate Teamwork - Working and guiding other people is one of the toughest skills to master. Let MindLeaders show you the way with course topics ranging from team leadership to maximizing communication.

Build your Netowrk & Portfolio - Tracking the progress of a project is only half of project management. Keepig stakeholders up to date, building relationships that will aid in task completion and delegating tasks across your team are also involved, and covered in this roadmap.

See the Project Management Roadmap Page for additional details.

This series examines topics related to creating an e-business. After providing an introduction to e-commerce, the series examines how to start an e-business, establishing a business presence, and creating critical applications. Also covered are the legal ramifications of e-commerce, transaction processing and data mining, managing costs, and the logistics of providing customer service and payment processing. Other topics covered include building a strategy to market and advertise your e-business, resource planning, and ongoing business management.

Due to increased competition and cutthroat pricing, a higher level of sales and marketing skills is essential in today's marketplace. You need to get out there fast to effectively disseminate your company's name and brand. You need to find new prospects and cultivate repeat customers. Our programs will help you effectively build your brand, garner new business and close the sale.

Roadmap Package

Get a full year of access to a collection of nearly 40 courses in the Sales Roadmap™, which will instruct you on the merits of effective presentations, gaining confidence and credibility during the sales process and finding solutions that will help close that all-important sale.

The Sales Process - A step-by-step approach to engaging potential customers and demonstrating why your product is the best choice.

Cultivating New Business - Learn the importance of building a personal network and how to use those connections to find new potential customers.

Finding Solutions - Discover new toolsets that will aid the sales team with problem solving, communicating and delivering effective messages.

Closing Business - Find out how to close the deal, with courses that teach the best methods for communicating with power, nogotiating the deal, and learn the persuasive arguments that help make that sale.

See the Sales Roadmap Page for additional details.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 will have a long lasting impact on the governance and financial accountability of publicly held companies. This series will provide the learner with an overview of the Act. Learners will master guidelines for making company policies, procedures, systems, and controls Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. Learners will also examine management certification responsibilities and noncompliance penalties under the Act.

Successful organizations are made up of individuals who are continually focused on developing the right skills for their job. Our self-management programs will help you develop the skills you need now and for your future.

This series works to educate managers and non-managers about the causes and effects of sexual harassment in the work environment. It looks at the elements that define behavior as harassment, methods that can be used to prevent it from occurring, as well as ways to deal with the situation if it happens. As of 8/17/07, the MindLeaders Sexual Harassment in the Workplace courses comply with the following legislation: California: Government Code 12950.1 (AB 1825), California Code of Regulations 7288, Connecticut General Statute Section 46a-54-204 and Maine Revised Statute, Title 26, Section 807.

SharePoint 2007 is a content and information management system for your organization. This series will help you use your SharePoint 2007 sites to share documents, collaborate on processes and materials, and find and share data throughout your organization.

Six Sigma is a strategy and methodology for improving the performance of an organization, focused on fact- and data-based decision making. These programs explain the basic principles of the Six Sigma process and the steps for successfully deploying it in an organization.

Stress is among the most common and harmful issues facing people in the working world. The information, practices, and exercises in this series will help you understand, control, and reduce stress.

This series teaches the learner practical methods for establishing and maintaining teams that maximize the collective strengths of their members. Learners will also acquire valuable team leadership skills.

It always seems like we could use an extra two hours (or more!) in the day. How can we manage our time and be truly productive in the office, and in life? This series will introduce you to the most important rules of time management, including not just how to get more done, but how to choose the things you do to give your day the biggest impact possible.

This series describes specific time-management strategies that learners can apply to make their work time more efficient and productive.

If you need to explain a complicated process, flowchart, organizational chart, or other diagram, Visio is the tool to help you. This series will walk you through using Visio to build visual information that easily communicates complex topics.

In today's hectic world, balancing work and personal life continues to be a constant challenge. We all want balance and we want it now. Our work lifestyle programs will provide you with up-to-date information on how to deal with today's issues faced by today's workforce.