Part of the retrospective mindset is to be able to constantly learn. We can learn from our previous experiences. We can learn from others. We can also learn from the infinite resources available today on the interwebs. Below is the list of courses I’ve done throughout my career and highly recommend. If you are looking for courses to develop your career, check it out!
Business 📊
Adaptive Leadership for Today’s Challenges
Author: Derek Cabrera
Traditional vs. Adaptive Leadership: Traditional leaders are like managers who oversee daily tasks and solve problems as they arise. Adaptive leaders, on the other hand, set up systems and conditions that empower employees to handle issues on their own, aligning with the organization’s vision and mission.
What you will learn:
- 2×2 Analysis:
- Determine if you’re building a new organization (builder) or working within an existing one (renovator).
- Decide if you’re internal or external to the organization.
- WMYM (What Makes You Mad):
- Identify the current state that frustrates you and your team.
- Describe in detail what you hope to change.
- Future State:
- Articulate the desired future state with your team.
- Identify how your organization will act as a catalyst for this change.
- Vision:
- As a leader, describe the future you envision.
- Ensure your vision is motivating, simple, measurable, and resonates with your team.
- Mission:
- Define the daily actions needed to achieve the vision.
- Ensure the mission is clear, concise, and measurable.
- Vision and Mission Alignment:
- Ensure that your mission, when executed repeatedly, will achieve your vision.
- Revisit and adjust if they are not aligned.
- Capacity and Mission Alignment:
- Identify the systems needed to support your mission.
- Remove any unnecessary systems that do not contribute to the mission.
- Learning:
- Promote individual and organizational learning.
- Ensure robust metrics to assess learning progress.
- Culture Building:
- Run a campaign to align everyone with the vision and mission.
- Use specific strategies for different groups (naysayers, fence-sitters, adopters, leaders).
🌐 Course URL: Adaptive Leadership for Today’s Challenges
🎓 My cert: Adaptive Leadership for Today’s Challenges
Making Sense of Complexity
Author: Jeffrey Colvin | Duke Corporate Education
Making Sense of Complexity focuses on the very nature of our working contexts today, arguing that the work we do is more complex than ever, and that this complexity demands new approaches. Participants will learn how to recognize, diagnose, and respond appropriately to complex environments and situations in a highly interactive course setting.
What you’ll learn:
- Describe why the kind of context you are in matters
- Explain the criteria for recognizing the context in which your project-based work exists
- Utilize lenses and frames to diagnose the context within which our project-based work resides Identify opportunities to leverage the context for success.
- Select the most successful approach to match your response to the environment
- Utilize mindsets, skillsets and toolsets that will enable success in working in complex environments
- Identify and align the stakeholders necessary for successful execution in complex environments.
🌐 Course URL: Making Sense of Complexity
🎓 My cert: Making Sense of Complexity
Certified Interviewer Training
Author: John Vlastelica
What you’ll learn:
- Introduction to Predicting Success
- What is the Predicting Success interviewing methodology and how will it help me become a better interviewer?
- Situational & Behavioral Interviewing Techniques
- What are the best interviewing techniques to help me predict whether this candidate will be great for my company, my culture, my role?
- Applying the Techniques
- How do I build and leverage questions to get me evidence that they have the skills, fit, achievements and job match I need for my company and role?
- Avoiding Bias & Illegal Practices in Interviewing
- “How do I ensure I’m not letting unconscious bias or illegal information impact my hiring decision?” This is a critical question of interviewers and hiring managers, as biased or illegal interview questions/ procedures can lead not just to a poor hiring decision, but poor candidate experience and potential legal action against the organisation. Learn how to stay on the right side of best practice with John Vlastelica.
- Creating a Great Interviewing Process
- How to create an efficient and effective interview process that is great for both your organisation’s hiring goals and the candidate’s experience of your organisation. Learn how to develop an effective phone screen, onsite and decision-making process that gets you quality hiring decisions, quickly.
- Making Great Hiring Decisions
- Answers the most difficult question: “How do I decide who to hire?” – Your interview process should have given you the evidence you need to evaluate against the hiring criteria and enable you and your interview panel to make the right hiring decision. Learn how to make that decision with confidence.
- Selling Candidates the Opportunity
- How best to sell your role to the candidate by finding out what their motivations are, what will encourage them to move, and how best to position selling in the interview process itself. This is not just for you in Recruiting, but also for Hiring Managers too!
🌐 Course URL: Certified Interviewer Training
🎓 My cert: Certified Interviewer Training
Coaching and Mentorship
Author: Holly Fawcett
As a People Manager, your role is to deliver results through people, however often as Managers, we help in the wrong way by over-delegating or we may take over the task and under-delegate. To truly grow the capabilities and success of each person in our team, we can best help by coaching them, mentoring their development and following up with dedicated training.
What you’ll learn:
- What is coaching? What is mentoring? Who are the main actors and what do they do when coaching, mentoring and training in a cooperative environment.
- How to create a habit as a coach and apply it to your own life – What are the questions I can use to coach my team and how do I apply them?
- Gaining skills to improve my overall performance and the performance of my team.
- Are you thinking of becoming a mentor? In this course, learn the skills you need to become an amazing mentor and the four stages of a successful mentoring relationship.
- Setting learning goals and outcomes to match the content that applies to them and how to plan my session and make an impact delivering it.
🌐 Course URL: Coaching and Mentorship
🎓 My cert: Coaching and Mentorship
Author: Johnny Campbell and Holly Fawcett
Johnny Campbell and Holly Fawcett will show you how to use social media to market your jobs and company to build better relationships within your sector. From Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to audio and video live streaming, learn how to build social engagement with your candidates, colleagues and other stakeholders.
What you’ll learn:
- Twitter is one of the top social media platforms worldwide. In this course, learn what makes this microblogging site so successful, and how to use these features for talent attraction. Get to know the ranking signals of Twitter’s algorithm and how you can make them work in your favour.
- Facebook is the number one social media platform worldwide. In this course, learn which features can be used for talent attraction, and how the Facebook algorithm works.
- Audio and video streaming are widely successful nowadays. In this course, learn the platforms where you can stream audio and video, what makes great audio-visual content, and how to use these channels for talent attraction.
- In this course, learn what makes a successful talent attraction strategy on social media, when to post and what is content automation.
- Have you noticed the engagement rate on your LinkedIn posts has dropped recently? Watch our 5 golden rules for sharing content on LinkedIn. In this course by Holly Fawcett, you will also learn how to use recent features like creator mode to boost your engagement.
- LinkedIn Groups allow you to have private discussions amongst your trusted peers. But how does it work? Holly Fawcett shows you exactly how. From best practices to strategies for engagement, you’ll have all the information you need to succeed.
- Learn how to use Instagram as a recruitment tool, including setting up your account, employer branding and sourcing techniques.
🌐 Course URL: Talent attraction on social media
🎓 My cert: Talent attraction on social media
Data Storytelling for business
Author: Diedre Downing
In this course, you will learn how to create visually stunning data stories to push your ideas and recommendations forward. The course will teach you how to communicate with data, clearly and effectively – by connecting with your audience through story and visualization best practices – so that your data presentations and reports effortlessly lead decision-makers down the right path.
What you’ll learn:
- Define what you’re trying to achieve
- Who is your audience?
- What is the purpose of your presentation?
- What is your message?
- How are you going to get straight to the point with clear storytelling titles?
- Display the data using the best visualization type to showcase your insights.
- Alternatives to charts such as tables and impact metrics
- The Cleveland McGill Scale for chart selection
- Best practices for configuring core chart types
- De-clutter and remove any distracting or unnecessary components from your visualization.
- Minimize chart junk
- Use the Gestalt Laws of Visual Perception
- Direct your audience’s attention to the most critical components of your visualization to support your key insights.
- Add value and direction with annotations and pre-attentive attributes
🌐 Course URL: Data Storytelling for business
🎓 My cert: Data Storytelling for business
Practical Time Management – Personal Productivity Tools
Author: Piotr Nabielec
Time management tools that will improve your productivity and work and life satisfaction.
What you’ll learn:
- What are the limitations of our brains and how to cooperate with them, rather than fight with them.
- Most useful tools, techniques, and habits used for task list management and calendar management.
- Practical solutions for managing focus and avoiding distractions.
- The essence of 40 books, like “Getting Things Done”, “The Power of Habit”, and “Essentialism”, over 10 years of practice in big companies and feedback from over 2.000 people.
🌐 Course URL: Practical Time Management by Piotr Nabielec
🎓 My cert: Practical Time Management – Personal Productivity Tools
Goal Crushing: Use OKRs to achieve business results
Author: Shelley Osborne
Communicate the strategic value of your work and cascade your goals using the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework.
What you’ll learn:
- You will learn what the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework is and why it is useful
- You will learn how to communicate the value of your work to your colleagues by writing strong, metric-driven OKRs
- You will learn models for how goals can cascade and practice cascading goals on your own
- You will write value-based key results with different types of metrics that demonstrate the results you are driving for the business
- You will learn methods for documenting your goals
- You will write your own value-based OKRs
🌐 Course URL: Goal Crushing – Write Strong Metric Driven OKRs
🎓 My cert: Goal Crushing: Use OKRs to achieve business results
Career Essentials in Generative AI by Microsoft and LinkedIn
Author(s): Pinar Seyhan Demirdag, Ashley Kennedy, Jess Stratton, Vilas Dhar, Doug Rose
The course is an incredible learning experience, packed with fascinating insights and quizzes. If you have a basic understanding of technology and a keen interest in delving into the world of #MachineLearning, #GenerativeAI, and #Ethics, I highly recommend checking it out!
What you’ll learn:
Discover the skills needed to apply generative AI in your career. Learn the core concepts of artificial intelligence and generative AI functionality.
- Develop an understanding of generative AI models.
- Learn the ethical considerations of using generative AI.
- Explore the impact of generative AI tools.
The course is made of 5 other courses covering various topics important in AI context
- What Is Generative AI?
- Generative AI: The Evolution of Thoughtful Online Search
- Streamlining Your Work with Microsoft Bing Chat
- Ethics in the Age of Generative AI
- Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
🌐 Course URL: Career Essentials in Generative AI by Microsoft and LinkedIn
🎓 My cert: Career Essentials in Generative AI
Communication 🤝
3-Step Writing System: Blogging & Writing Secrets
Author: Tyler Speegle
Blogging & writing tips for beginners to pros. Become an expert blogger/freelance writer. Ultimate blog writing course!
You will learn:
- A 3-step proven plan that will make you a PRO blogger
- How to make your blog stand out & get noticed
- The secret to keeping new ideas flowing so you never run out
- How to organize your blogging ideas
- How to craft killer headlines
- 2 secret ways to start ANY article
- How to revise your writing like a professional
- How to optimize every blog post
- How to make your writing as shareable, scannable, and readable as possible
- A practical plan for writing one killer article every single week
🌐 Course URL: 3 Step Writing System
🎓 My cert: 3-Step Writing System: Blogging & Writing Secrets
Ninja Writing: The Four Levels Of Writing Mastery
Author: Shani Raja
Turn Your Business Writing, Blogs, Books & Essays Into Masterpieces.
You will learn:
- the little-known writing secrets of editors on top newspapers and websites.
- how to tap into the enormous power of the narrative, paragraphs, sentences and words.
- how to transform yourself into a masterful writer in just days or weeks.
- how to make your prose stand out massively from that of your peers and competitors.
- how to make your blogs, books and business writing sparkle.
- how to create spellbinding writing with ease.
- the tricks of the trade from an experienced ex-Wall Street Journal editor.
- the narrative level
- How to connect with your audience, organize your writing magnificently, start your piece with a bang, end with a flourish, and embed it with powerful imagery. Getting the structure right is one of the hardest skills to master, but I’ll make it super easy for you in this section.
- the paragraph level
- How to weave points through paragraphs, so your writing looks exceptionally ordered and polished.
- the sentence level
- How to turn limp and bloated sentences into sharp, graceful and rhythmic expressions of your ideas.
- the word level
- How to choose precise and evocative words, and strip your writing of any that carry dead weight.
🌐 Course URL: Ninja Writing The Four Levels of Writing Mastery
🎓 My cert: Ninja Writing: The Four Levels Of Writing Mastery
Radiate Confidence: How to Create a 1000 Watt Presence
Author: Alexa Fischer
Helping you unlock your inner light, or presence, so you can easily, effortlessly connect with everyone you meet.
What you’ll learn:
- Create a dynamic, expressive persona that radiates authenticity.
- Connect to the power of positive thoughts to build confidence.
- Tame the voices of doubt that have blocked you in the past.
- Engage in conversation with ease and agility.
- Dynamically pitch yourself and your business.
- Learn communication skills to excel in the business world
- Present your message with passion and purpose.
- Inspire audiences on-camera.
- Build a tribe of fans.
🌐 Course URL: 1000 Watt Presence
🎓 My cert: Radiate Confidence: How to Create a 1000 Watt Presence
Becoming a Better Listener
Author: Jason Alba
The ideas in this course can help you communicate better by listening better. We cover ideas that you can incorporate right now! You can improve your active listening skills, show people you care about them and their message, and have better relationships.
What you’ll learn:
- The What and Why of Listening
- Improve Your Active Listening Skills
- Active Listening Skills Tips and Systems
- Helping Others Listen to You
🌐 Course URL: Becoming a Better Listener
🎓 My cert: Becoming a Better Listener
Cultivate Your Personal Strengths Using Gallup Tools
Author: Alice Meredith
All individuals have character strengths and weaknesses and identifying these strengths and weaknesses is a key foundation for our professional success. This course will help you with cultivating your biggest strengths.
What you’ll learn:
- Strength-Based Psychology
- Gallup’s Study of Human Strengths
- Identify Your Dominant Strengths
- Understanding Your Strengths
- Maximize Your Strengths, Navigate Around Your Weaknesses
- Achieve By Living, Working, and Playing Through Your Strengths
🌐 Course URL: Cultivate Your Personal Strengths Using Gallup Tools
🎓 My cert: Cultivate Your Personal Strengths Using Gallup Tools
Technical 🤖
Fundamentals of Cloud Computing
Author: David Davis
Cloud Computing is, more and more, being used by everyone for just about everything. But what exactly IS cloud computing? Watch this course to learn what cloud computing is, the many forms of cloud computing, how cloud computing works, and more.
What you’ll learn:
- Cloud Computing – The Basics
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Infrastructure as a Service Networking
- Storage in the Cloud
- Infrastructure as a Service: Security
- Comparing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Software as a Service (SaaS) Cloud Solutions
🌐 Course URL: Fundamentals of Cloud Computing
🎓 My cert: Fundamentals of Cloud Computing
Introduction to the Cisco Certified DevNet Associate Certification
Author: Nick Russo
Perhaps you’ve heard of the new Cisco DevNet certifications, announced at Cisco Live US 2019. This short course serves as a learning path introduction to the Cisco Certified DevNet Associate certification, and specifically, the DEVASC exam.
What you’ll learn:
- foundational knowledge required to pass the DEVASC exam by focusing on skills-based technical training, not exam topic cramming
- about all the courses in the learning path to help you achieve that goal
- Whether or not you are the target audience for this exam, in case there is any doubt.
- Some personal exam tips to help set you up for success.
- When you’re finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge of Cisco DevNet technologies needed to attempt the DEVASC exam on your path to earning your certification.
🌐 Course URL: Introduction to the Cisco Certified DevNet Associate Certification
🎓 My cert: Introduction to the Cisco Certified DevNet Associate Certification
💡If you are interested in the network automation topic, you should check Nick’s DevNet curated live course list.
Getting Started with Software Development Using Cisco DevNet
Author: Nick Russo
Are you new to software development and need a simple, no-frills crash course to get up to speed? This course will teach you the fundamental methodologies, design patterns, and tools needed to begin your journey.
What you’ll learn:
- Learning the Foundations of Software Design
- Working with Structured Data and Local Version Control
- Creating and Managing Basic Github Repositories
- Introducing Application Programming Interfaces (API)
- Deploying the Python requests Library
🌐 Course URL: Getting Started with Software Development Using Cisco DevNet
🎓 My cert: Getting Started with Software Development Using Cisco DevNet
💡If you are interested in the network automation topic, you should check Nick’s DevNet curated live course list.
Books 📚
- Legally Free Python Books List
- Top 22 Best AI, Machine Learning And Deep Learning Books Of All Time
- The best Books to learn Machine Learning from Zero to Hero
- Free eBooks: 100+ Free Data Science Books
- 7 books to help you understand Web3, blockchain, the metaverse, and other visions for the internet’s future
- Free Book: D2L.ai: Interactive Deep Learning Book with Multi-Framework Code, Math, and Discussions