Top 5 Courses for Young Business Leaders

Are you new to leadership or management?  Have you stepped up into a new role?  Have you recently been tapped to be a (or the) leader in the business?

If so, you need to upgrade your skills.  When the leader improves, everyone else gets better!

You know that you have gaps in your knowledge base, but how do you go about filling them?

We all have the same options:

• Piece it together for free using YouTube
• Upend your life by taking expensive, formal, university classes
• Engage in online e-learning

The advantage of e-learning is that you can study on your own time, from anywhere, at your own pace.  You will learn from industry professionals instead of theories out of books.

What you are looking for is practical knowledge.  A diploma might look good on your wall, but it won’t add much to your business results.

So, here is our list of five great e-learning courses that are relatively short (between two and three hours), certificated, affordable, and very practical:

Course #1: Building your personal plan

It’s one thing to manage other people, and quite another to manage yourself.  The truth is that you are the most difficult person you will ever have to lead!  It all starts with you having a sense of direction and clearly laid out goals.  Once you have this accomplished for yourself, you can help others write their personal plans too.

This course helps you evaluate where you want to be in the future, where you are today, and helps you put a plan in place to get there.  You’ll also learn how to build strong accountability structures around you so that your plans aren’t derailed.

As the saying goes, those without a plan are planning to fail.

The course also comes with templates and cheat sheets.  Read more about it here:

https://learning.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/courses/107-personal-annual-plan

Course #2: Enhancing your career through delegation

You’ve proven that you’re a strong personal performer.  If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be getting into a new role as a leader.

Being a leader is simply setting goals and bringing strong people along with you.  That means that in order to get anywhere or accomplish anything, you’re going to have to achieve results through other people. That skill is called delegation.

The leader learns a role and then trains another person to do it.  Then the leader moves up.  Rinse and repeat.  This is the formula for the successful business leader.

Enhancing your career through delegation teaches you how to increase your impact, build a stronger team, and do what you love to do rather than what you have to do.  The course comes with templates and cheat sheets.

Read more about it here:

https://learning.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/courses/how-to-delegate

Course #3: Personality testing using DISC

This course is free, and comes with a free, 25 question assessment and a seven-page booklet to go along with it.  It’s simple and very effective.    A leader must know where people fit in the organization, and how they’re motivated.

In this course, you will learn to understand the motivation and communication style of others and learn how to put people in roles that take advantage of their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.  This course is highly recommended, and can be viewed here:

https://learning.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/courses/personality-testing-using-disc

Course #4: Understanding financial statements

Are you embarrassed at your lack of financial literacy?  Are you confused by terms like Profit and Loss statement, earnings statement, and income statement?  Do your eyes gloss over when sheets of numbers are pulled out?  If so, this free course that will take away the mystery of the most basic financial statement.

You can’t advance in a company without a basic understanding of how financial statements work.

This course on financial statements will help you understand the financial strength of a company so that you can make informed decisions.  Find out more about it here:

https://courses.corporatefinanceinstitute.com/courses/learn-to-read-financial-statements-free-course

Course #5: How to hire A-players

Hiring is one of the most important activities any organization engages in, and one of the least understood.

Even if you’ve attended business school and earned your MBA, it’s unlikely that you learned any practical skills on this most important topic.

This course covers the entire hiring process, from sourcing, screening, interviewing and reference checking.

You can see more about the course here:

https://learning.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/courses/hiring

In summary:

HR professionals need to continually upgrade their skills.  Online courses are a simple, affordable, and effective way to do that without the cost and time required to attend formal schooling.

The top 5 e-learning HR manager courses are:

1. Building your personal plan
2. Enhancing your career through delegation
3. Personality testing using DISC
4. Understanding financial statements
5. How to hire A-players

Additional resources

Thanks for reading this article on The Top 5 young leader courses.  Below are additional resources from Professional Leadership Institute, the global provider of online human resources and leadership tools

• Leading with empathy: https://www.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/resources/leading-with-empathy-and-curiosity/
• Why we tolerate under performance and how to deal with it: https://www.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/resources/why-we-tolerate-under-performance-and-how-to-deal-with-it/
• The four basic steps to delegation https://www.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/resources/the-four-basic-steps-to-delegation/
• How to discover the core values of your organization https://www.professionalleadershipinstitute.com/resources/how-to-discover-the-core-values-of-your-organization/