Workplace Success: Seven Key Skills to Succeed

There have been a number of studies that identify the key skills that workers need to be successful. Various studies call them different things – critical employability skills, soft skills, or transferrable skills. Regardless of the name these skills are critical for workplace success. Seven of the most commonly identified skills are: Being a Productive Team Member, Flexibility, Problem Solving, Resourcefulness, Giving and Receiving Feedback, Self-Confidence, Creative Thinking and Emotional Intelligence. Many of us possess one or more of these attributes already and perhaps all of them. Luckily these skills can be improved upon through training.

This two-day course looks to take you from where you are now to a new level of understanding for the key skills that will help to make you successful at work.

• Know your own team member roles and responsibilities.
• Understand ways to be an effective team member.
• Know how it feels to experience change and know your level of change tolerance.
• Understand ways to be flexible in times of change.
• Know what a problem is and ways to approach problem solving.
• Recognize the self-fulfilling prophecy and its relevance to their work.
• Appreciate the variety of behaviors that characterize resourcefulness in the workplace.
• Identify tips to giving and receiving feedback.
• Realize the uses of feedback to increase their strengths as leaders in the workplace.

We will spend the first part of the day getting to know other participants and discussing what will take place during the workshop. Students will also have an opportunity to identify their personal learning objectives.

This session will have students complete a Team Roles and Responsibilities Questionnaire to determine what kind of team player they are. They will also look at a guidelines to being an effective team leader.

Students will assess their change tolerance in this session by completing an exercise and then explore how to become more tolerant and flexible.

What a problem is will be defined in this session and students will also look at ways to approach problems. Students will also be introduced to eight essentials to defining a problem and actually solve a problem.

This session covers the danger of the self-fulfilling prophecy and explores the characteristics of resourcefulness.

This session covers ways to give and receive feedback through feedback interviews and a simulated feedback session.

This session will show students what behaviors are associated with high and low self-confidence. They will also look at a three-step process that can be used to increase self-confidence.

Brainstorming as a method for creative thinking is considered here and students will also look at some other methods that can be used for creative thinking.

This session explores the history of social and emotional intelligence and looks at Daniel Goleman’s five interrelated sets of Social and Emotional Competencies and their importance in workplace success.

At the end of the course, students will have an opportunity to ask questions and fill out an action plan.