PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SKILLS

These classes are held either at PST or at the client site.  They are conveniently scheduled for each company.  Please call us at 912-356-1444 for pricing and additional information.  Class lengths may vary,  and they can be customized to fit your organization's needs. The more populare programs are listed below.

Effective Communication
Effective Communication examines the fundamental elements of communication and describes how you can send clear and consistent messages to a Receiver. It gives tips for choosing the right communication method and considering other important factors that impact effectiveness. It covers effective listening and feedback skills in practical and immediately useful Strategies and Tips.

Time Management
Are you haunted by the feeling that your days are going faster and faster? Is your life an endless procession of Monday, Friday, Monday, Friday, and where did the weekend go, anyway? Time, our most valuable and transient resource, is either used or lost. Maybe it's time you took control of the situation. We’ll give you tips, suggestions and tools to accomplish effective time management.

Customer Service
This course is designed to target those skills most critical for Achieving Customer Service Excellence, including prioritizing, relationship building, listening, asking effective questions, and measuring your own performance. Students in this course will build or enhance their skills, contributing not only to the quality of service, but also to their organization’s overall success.

Achieving Customer Service Excellence
Customer Service Representative is one of the fastest growing careers in all types of organizations. Providing the level of service today’s customer expects requires a high level of skill. This course is designed to target those skills most critical for Achieving Customer Service Excellence, including prioritizing, relationship building, listening, asking effective questions, and measuring your own performance. Participants in this course will build or enhance their skills, contributing not only to the quality of service, but to their organization’s overall success.

Business Grammar/Writing Skills
How we respond to our customers and coworkers has an impact on everyone. This workshop discusses “to do” and “no-no’s” on how to respond verbally in various situation. In Writing for Business, you’ll learn how to organize your thoughts, write a complete first draft, and make your everyday e-mails, memos, and reports useful, logical, and compelling.

Running a Meeting
Running effective meetings is one thing every good manager must be able to do. It’s not easy! How often should meetings be held? How can a manager ensure that people show up on time? Communicate with each other? Get things done after the meeting? In this course, you will learn how to establish goals for your meetings, set realistic agendas, work with others on meeting etiquette, and create plans to turn decisions into actions.

Presentation Skills/Making a Presentation
Making presentations is a part of many managers' jobs. This course provides you with useful information on how to make those presentations a success: how to prepare, practice, and present information to achieve the results you want. Presenting information to a group can be an exciting opportunity to share ideas and information that is important to you. However, it can also be a significant source of stress if you lack confidence in your ability to plan what to say and how to say it. Many people dread speaking in public, or avoid it altogether, because they are afraid they will say or do something wrong and look silly to people they want to impress. However, there is no need to let anxiety keep you from being willing and able to share ideas with a group. When you gain an understanding of how to prepare a presentation, you can feel comfortable speaking in public and give presentations with confidence.

Conflict Resolution
Managers and supervisors have the opportunity to provide leadership in their organizations: inspiring people to new levels of performance, modeling the culture, and carrying out strategy. In this capacity, they are often faced with difficult, even sensitive situations. To handle difficult issues effectively, they require an understanding of legal and policy guidelines, and they need skills in handling complaints, resolving conflicts, using disciplinary measures, and terminating employment.

Hiring Employees
The most important decisions managers make are hiring decisions. Without the right people, a division or company cannot succeed. But how do you find the right people? How do you write a job description, and how flexible should it be? How can you apply consistent guidelines in interviewing situations so that you are able to make good choices between applicants? What factors are the best predictors of performance? This course will provide you with answers to these significant questions, and help you start improving your hiring skills right away.

Leadership Skills
In this course you will explore the fundamental skills for leading a group, defining the task, establishing a vision, gaining commitment, and building relationships. You will examine how and when to use various leadership styles and techniques to help leaders direct the efforts of others. The course includes strategies and tips to teach you how to foster innovation, provide appropriate direction, and develop and maintain positive relationships.

Discharging Employees
There are strict legal requirements as well as personal accountability when discharging an employee. This course covers all the critical aspects of termination, including information about the law and how it impacts the process and your decision. You will be given methods for identifying when discharge is appropriate and tools to help you prepare for the meeting. You will also learn specific techniques for communicating the decision and handling difficult employee reactions.

Assessing Employee Performance and Conducting Reviews
Performance appraisals are important milestones in the development of a manager’s staff. They provide an opportunity to review past goals, establish future goals, identify development opportunities, and pinpoint areas for improvement. In this topic, you’ll learn to prepare yourself and your people for the appraisal process, so that you approach it with consistent expectations. You’ll learn how to give positive and negative feedback, how to track goals and progress, and how to help people develop their own career goals.

Managing Difficult Interactions
In this course, you will learn how to manage difficult interactions more effectively, keep key employees on board, and help people who may not like each other to work together productively.

Setting Performance Goals & Expectations
Performance goals establish what your employees need to accomplish, while expectations define how to accomplish them.

Retaining Valued Employees
Keeping your best employees can give your firm and essential competitive edge. But the retention-improvement process requires more strategy and discipline than you might think. In this course you will explore the strategies that can help all managers attract and keep top performers.

Motivating Employees
Only a highly motivated workforce will turn out stellar performance. But everyone's motivations are different. What works for one employee may not work for another. And every individual has unique priorities and needs. What can a leader do? It's not as hard as you think.

TEAM Building/Problem Solving
This course identifies some of the most useful group problem-solving techniques that teams can use. You will learn how to encourage collaboration on your team, work through problems together, and combine methods for complex problems. You will be given tools and techniques to help you follow a standard problem-solving process, and get team consensus and support. The course also includes tools to aid you in tracking results and implementing corrective action.

Delegating
This course takes you through every step of the delegation process from beginning to end. You will learn how to define the task and determine to whom it should be given. There are tips and techniques for monitoring the project’s progress without micromanaging, and methods for coaching and developing employees along the way. There are also tools and methods to help you get the most value from every assignment.

Managing Workplace Stress
Stress in the workplace can't ever be completely eliminated--nor should it be!--but it can be managed so that you can function in a healthy and effective way. In this course you will explore practical, hands-on suggestions for managing workplace stress--from short-term "quick fixes" to long-term methods for changing the situation and/or changing your response to the situation.

Telephone Skills
After completing this course you will be able to communicate ideas and solutions for both yours and the customers benefit, guide your clients to the best decisions while allowing them to believe your ideas are theirs, improve the size of your client base, and improve your telephone sales and etiquette.

International Diversity in the Workplace
Bienvenidos a Savannah! Welcome to Savannah! We are steadily becoming a new home for a variety of international cultures, particularly Spanish speakers. This course explores how to meet, greet, manage, and work with newcomers for Latin countries. We'll explore some cultural differences that are important for successful working relationships (such as different perceptions about time). Ideal for health care professionals, law firms, government agencies, construction companies, educators, manufacturers, and others. Can be tailored to include working with people from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Finance Essentials
Finance Essentials will provide an overview of the basics of finance in business. It will cover financial roles and responsibilities in business organizations, discuss the purpose of financial reports and documents as well as how to read them, and examine money in business and the role of the federal government in regulating financial concerns. Finally, this course will cover financial management and financial ethics.

Fundamentals of Selling
This course provides an overview of the basics of selling with an emphasis on the different stages of the sales cycle. It provides guidelines and best practices for preparing to sell, finding and qualifying prospects, making sales presentations, negotiating the close, and following up after the sale. By applying the tools and techniques presented in this course, sales professionals will benefit by increasing their sales efficiency and effectiveness.

Emotional Intelligence
This course is designed to help you acquaint others with the basic concepts related to emotional intelligence. In this course, participants will understand what emotional intelligence is and why it is important, identify areas in which their emotional intelligence can be improved, and explore six strategies for increasing emotional intelligence in the workplace.

Change Management
This course teaches students how to develop the skills to proactively address change and meet the challenges of transition in the workplace. Students will work with various employees to overcome the problems encountered when making changes in your organization. Students will also learn how to develop the ability to effectively handle organizational changes by examining the transition process and understanding their own, and others, needs and responses to each phase. The manual is designed for quick scanning in the classroom and filled with interactive exercises that help ensure student success.

Additional Programs Available....call 912-356-1444 for outlines and detailed program information.