Individual Excellence

About This Course

Develop career-enhancing skills in a single course that covers twelve popular one-day seminar topics, including goal setting, time management, and personal organization. You'll learn how to improve your creative abilities, gain confidence with financial matters, and how to minimize conflict in your life. Develop a fulfilling career plan and improve relationships with co-workers, friends, and family.

About The Instructor

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Becky and Tony Swaim.

Becky and Tony Swaim have helped thousands of clients, colleagues, and students reach organizational and personal goals. Working in the medical, manufacturing and education fields, the Swaims manage a successful consulting firm in southern California. Starting her career as a medical administrative assistant, Becky provides assistance as a program manager to various medical practices and has managed a large staff in the medical reimbursement field. Becky earned a Bachelor's of Arts degree in Speech Communication from California State University, Long Beach. Tony Swaim has been an accomplished online instructor since 1998. His industry experience includes twenty years of medical device manufacturing management. Tony's consulting areas are project management, customer service, total quality and supply chain management. He earned an MBA from California State University, Long Beach and holds professional certifications in five disciplines.

Syllabus

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week 1

Wednesday - Lesson 01

Career planning creates a road map for your life. It determines what you do and when you do it. Effective career planning begins with a self-assessment, continues on to researching potential career moves, and ends with goal setting. Today, we'll show you how to start developing a useful career plan, regardless of whether you're at the beginning of your journey or have been traveling on the road for a while.

Friday - Lesson 02

In our first lesson, we identified goal setting as an important ingredient in developing your career plan. We shared a step-by-step process for creating and implementing meaningful goals. In this lesson, we'll investigate many more elements of effective goal setting. We'll also explore the nature of creative thinking and share methods for increasing your creativity.

Week 2

Wednesday - Lesson 03

Whenever two or more people interact, communication takes place. Unfortunately, communication often leads to misunderstanding, frustration, and dissatisfaction. Today, you'll learn how to become a better verbal communicator. We'll help you develop a clear message, deliver it through the right communication channels, and improve your listening and understanding of body language and other forms of nonverbal communication.

Friday - Lesson 04

Now that you have a good understanding of verbal communication, it's time to discuss written communication. In this lesson, we'll present principles and concepts to help you plan, organize, and write your ideas so that you become a master communicator. We'll also discuss the various types of written documents such as reports, memos, e-mails, letters, proposals, policies, and procedures.

Week 3

Wednesday - Lesson 05

Personal organization is a highly desirable goal, but one that many people find hard to achieve. It's not about having good intentions or telling a close friend, "This year I'm going to be organized!" The keys to personal organization are awareness, preparation, execution, and follow-through. Our objective for today's lesson is to help you use these keys to open the doors that will lead you to becoming organized.

Friday - Lesson 06

Life is filled with opportunities, problems, and choices. So, today, we'll examine key elements of problem solving, present a model of decision-making, and discuss how to use numerical methods to arrive at the best solutions.

Week 4

Wednesday - Lesson 07

In this lesson, we'll discuss time management, which should really be called self management. The ability to use time wisely makes it easier to accomplish tasks, improves performance, and reduces stress. So, your goal should be to use time to increase your productivity and accomplish a greater number of objectives. The concepts we'll discuss today will help you do just that.

Friday - Lesson 08

Stress is an unavoidable part of life and can't be eliminated. You experience stress during a salary negotiation, a visit to the dentist for a root canal, or at an exciting basketball game. When you manage your stress, you increase your chances of enjoying a fulfilling and rewarding life. In this lesson, we'll help you understand what stress really is, identify where it comes from, find out how it affects you, and learn some stress reduction and coping strategies.

Week 5

Wednesday - Lesson 09

Risk taking and risk avoiding are parts of everyday life. Life requires choices and choices require risks. These days, how well you identify, research, measure, and take risks is a big part of what determines how successful you will be. Today, we'll help you understand what risk is and present concepts and strategies to help you take calculated risks and make the right choices.

Friday - Lesson 10

Most people dislike conflict. But it's often unavoidable. Conflict comes from your beliefs, opinions, values, desires, needs, and habits. Contrary to what many people think, conflict is not necessarily undesirable. In this lesson, you'll learn where conflict comes from and examine different strategies that can help you manage it constructively.

Week 6

Wednesday - Lesson 11

Some people call accounting the language of business. To be able to use this language, you need to have a good grasp of key financial concepts and fundamentals. So, today, we'll discuss the differences between bookkeeping and accounting, share basic accounting terms, show you various types of accounting methods, and walk you through the two most widely used financial statements.

Friday - Lesson 12

In our final lesson, we'll continue our discussion of accounting and finance. We'll examine various types of costs, determine what cash flow really means, identify key differences between financial and cost accounting, and explore how to make rational investments. After all, you don't mind making a little money, do you?

Requirements

Internet access, e-mail, and the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser.