Professional Communication

Hours: 8 / Access Length: 180 Days / Delivery: Online, Self-Paced

Course Overview:

Communication is the ultimate key to your success—in relationships, in the workplace, in personal matters, as a family member, team member and across your lifetime. Your ability to communicate comes from experience. This experience can often be an effective source, but the methods in which you communicate play a critical role in how you more efficiently communicate with your audience and to ensure the intended meaning is received.  

In this course, material is presented to help you strengthen your communication skills to become a more effective communication. The course also focuses on everyday writing, professional presentations, and interpersonal communication. 

Students will:

• Define communication, identify the keys to good communication and discuss ways in which they can improve their communication skills.
• Develop a better understanding of how they communicate and the ways in which their communication styles can cause issues and mis-communication.
• Become a more effective communicator—in your writing, in your presentations, and in your one-on-one dealings with others—and is organized accordingly.
• Develop a clear communication purpose.
• Become audience focused - because communication—in any form—won’t do its job if it fails to consider the needs, attitudes, and information preferences of the intended audience.
• Observe economy of words where every word should make a meaningful contribution.

Course Outline:

Lesson 1:  Good Writing

Explains a number of principles that you should keep in mind before you tap out a single word on the computer. These principles are concerned with the purpose of your communication, the audience and its needs, the message you want the audience to walk away with, and the best medium and timing of delivery.

Lesson 2:  Start-Up Strategies

This lesson aims to get you started—one of the toughest parts of written communication. It offers many suggestions for overcoming writer’s block.

Lesson 3:  The First Draft

This section explains how to create a reasonably good first draft. This job begins with getting your thoughts out in the open, where they can be logically organized.

Lesson 4:  Getting it Right

Once the draft is created, it will need to be edited for style, content, and accuracy—the subject of lesson 4. Some styles are appropriate for directing action, conveying facts, or delivering news—good and bad. Others are more appropriate for being convincing. You’ll learn how to choose a style that matches your purpose and how to fine-tune your writing.

Lesson 5: Everyday Writing

Once you’ve learned the principles of good writing and how to draft and edit your work, you can apply what you’ve learned to virtually any form of written document: a report, a letter, and so forth. In lesson 5, we take up the particulars of the three most common written forms: memos, letters, and e-mail. Each has features you need to understand if you want to get your ideas across—and stay out of trouble.

Lesson 6: Presentations

Lesson 6 involves formal presentations in which you have to stand and deliver in front of a live audience. This chapter describes time-tested principles that you can use as a foundation for your presentations.

Lesson 7: Backstage

Lesson 7 involves more of the presentation preparation and due diligence in creating and designing effective presentations. This chapter moves from principles to six practical steps you can take in preparing those presentations.

Lesson 8: Show Time

Lesson 8 involves the power of speaking effectively.  This lesson offers suggestions on achieving the power of delivery advocated by Quintilian. And, naturally, the first suggestion is about speaking.

Lesson 9: Dialogue

This lesson is concerned with the one-on-one communication that characterizes the majority of our interpersonal encounters in the workplace. Here you’ll learn how to understand the other person’s perspective and to deal with the other person’s perception of you. You’ll also gain insights into the importance of dialogue, the most productive form of communication between people.

All necessary course materials are included.

System Requirements:

Internet Connectivity Requirements:

• Cable, Fiber, DSL, or LEO Satellite (i.e. Starlink) internet with speeds of at least 10mb/sec download and 5mb/sec upload are recommended for the best experience.

NOTE: While cellular hotspots may allow access to our courses, users may experience connectivity issues by trying to access our learning management system.  This is due to the potential high download and upload latency of cellular connections.   Therefore, it is not recommended that students use a cellular hotspot as their primary way of accessing their courses.

Hardware Requirements:

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher.  1920x1080 resolution is recommended for the best experience.
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone for Webinar or Live Online sessions.

Operating System Requirements:

• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions
  

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

Web Browser Requirements:

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

Basic Software Requirements (These are recommendations of software to use):

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is described in the above course outline.