In the business world, your success depends on the skills that you bring to the table.
Some skills are tried-and-true and remain relevant across sectors; others require you to have you finger on the pulse of what’s happening now.
Read on to find out what skills can help you stand out in the modern workplace, and the courses we have at UW Professional & Continuing Education to help you get started.
1. Business Writing
As technologies come and go, one evergreen skill remains hugely useful: writing. Business professionals need to be competent across myriad forms of communication: emails, proposals, presentations, instant messages and more.
Being able to write well – and persuasively -- is an essential skill in any business, and the UW’s Business Writing: Reports, Proposals & Documents course is built to help you hone your writing chops — with an emphasis on long-form writing.
In this course, you'll learn what constitutes good business writing and how to write effective documents that are rich and articulate. You'll explore different kinds of business documents and focus on the importance of structure and putting the audience at the center of your writing.
Drawing on reader science, you’ll learn how to write persuasively and make your documents intuitive and readable without simplifying your ideas and losing pertinent details. Business Writing: Reports, Proposals & Documents supplies you with plenty of practice writing documents and incorporating feedback from your instructor and peers.
- Next Start: October 2021
- Format: Online With Real-Time Meetings
- Duration: 7 weeks
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2. Data Analysis
You’ve likely heard similar statistics before, but it bears repeating: 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, and that number is only going up.
As data piles up businesses need employees who can harness and analyze the numbers. According to LinkedIn, business analysis — under which data analysis falls — made the biggest leap in the company’s 2020 ranking of hard skills that businesses covet most.
Now more than ever, understanding how to analyze data is a vital skill for any job-seeker — and it’s a skill you’ll gain in the UW’s Foundations of Data Analysis course
In the nine-week class, you'll learn how to understand, analyze and present data. The course starts with a broad overview of the data analysis process and then develops each of the fundamental data analysis skills.
You’ll acquire and clean data using SQL and Excel and analyze data using key statistical concepts such as measures of central tendency, correlation and regression and clustering. And — because it's important to be able to communicate your findings — you’ll learn how to choose the best visualization for your data and to design effective visualizations using Tableau.
You can take this course on its own or use it as a foundation for the Certificate in Data Analytics: Techniques for Decision Making or the Certificate in Data Visualization.
- Next Start: September 2021
- Format: Online With Real-Time Meetings
- Duration: 9 weeks
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3. Project Management
Project management is one of the most versatile skills in the business world, and a foundational understanding of the practice can reap huge dividends. Project management helps you learn effective teamwork skills, including collaboration, communication and dealing with conflict — all vital tools you can bring to any business.
The UW’s Foundations of Project Management course will help you add this essential skill to your repertoire. You’ll start with the basics of business vocabulary and working in a professional environment. From there, you’ll learn the importance of project management and how it fits into business practice.
The course covers best practices for balancing priorities and making decisions within business constraints. Finally, you’ll get practice reviewing business cases and data to draw conclusions and create actionable plans.
You can take Foundations of Project Management by itself or use it to prepare for the UW Certificate in Project Management, which starts right after.
- Next Start: November 2021
- Format: Online With Real-Time Meetings
- Duration: 4 weeks
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