Professional Certificate Programs for
Performance ImprovementOnline @ Ithaca College Overview  The program, provided by Ithaca College's Division of Graduate and Professional Studies, is designed for performance improvement professionals who wish to expand their management and consulting skills.
The courses provide concepts and skills necessary for you to: - more effectively manage projects and teams,
- build coalitions, and
- pitch and show value for performance system projects and infrastructures.
Each course provides practical tools and advice, as well as giving you the theoretical underpinning and vocabulary needed to more effectively explain and defend your strategic decisions. Past participants have reported these benefits: - Promotions and pay raises
- Recognition as a leader and innovator in their organization
- Improved team work
- Creating an on-going, professional network across diverse industries and occupational titles
- Increased effectiveness in solving problems
- Immediate application of new concepts and skills
- Anytime, anywhere flexibility to fit a demanding and busy schedule
Highlights - 2 week asynchronous online courses provide important collaborative learning opportunities, yet offer flexibility to meet your schedule.
- Courses cover immediately relevant professional topics (see course descriptions).
- Complete 4 courses to earn your professional certificate.
- Online course discussions are facilitated by Faculty Experts offering great learning and networking opportunities with peers.
- Each course requires approximately 10 hours of work including readings, participation in online discussions, and course assignments or projects.
- Each course earns 1 CEU (Continuing Education Unit) for a total of 4 CEUs for completing the certificate program.
Certificate Programs
To earn a certificate, four online courses are required from within your certificate program. You must ensure each course you register for is included in your certificate program. All fees for each of the 4 courses you select are included in the certificate program fee (no indvidual course fees apply).
You may also register for individual course(s) outside of a certificate program or take additonal individual courses. Registration for a certification program is NOT required to enroll in individual courses.
An overview of each course follows, along with each course's designated certificate program(s). The certificate programs are identified by their program code: PEM: Performance Evaluation and Measurement PIM: Performance Improvement Management LNV: Leading Networked Organizations and Virtual Teams
Courses & Certificate Program(s)21st Century Leadership for the Networked Organization
Certificate: LNV Today's global and evolving economy requires that we re-think traditional models of self-contained, bureaucratic organizations. Partnerships, collaborative projects, and coalitions of independent workers are the ways that important work will be accomplished, but it requires a very different set of leadership assumptions and skills.
Building an Engaged Workforce: Creating a Great Place to Work
Certificate: PIM Without an engaged workforce that bottom line is more difficult to achieve. You’ll explore what engagement means and how organizations can create workplaces where employees are committed to helping achieve the goals of the organization.
Change Management
Certificate: PIM Change efforts are often complex, messy, and impacted by cultural forces. You will examine concepts, models, roles, and best practices for implementing and managing change initiatives effectively.
Collaboration Maturity: Designing Partnerships for Trust and Synergy
Certificate: LNV There are different levels of collaboration - a scale of increased merging of efforts. Driving to the highest level of collaboration is not the best going-in strategy. Rather, you need to understand the current nature of interactions; and how to reach and work at the optimal level of shared interactions based on the goals of the organizations involved and the situational dynamics. Turn your collaborative strategies into a competitive advantage - or risk being left behind.
Designing and Modeling Communication Systems and Infrastructures
Certificate: PEM | PIM Learn how to become the architect of a coherent and vibrant system of rules (policies, procedures, and standards) and tools (technologies and vehicles).
Evaluating Emerging Technologies
Certificate: PIM | LNV Learn what’s hot and what’s not even on the radar screen, and how to assess if and how you should adopt a new technology.
Focus Groups: The Psychology And Technology Of Profitable Group Discussion
Certificate: PEM A productive group discussion can provide new insights and generate valuable ideas. A poorly run focus group can stifle creativity and impede understanding. The difference lies in appreciating the psychology of group processes, knowing what causes focus groups to fail, and mastering a few key techniques for focus group success. Today, as technology opens new venues for conducting focus group research, understanding the people within the communication is more important than ever.
How Not To Be Lied To By Statistics: Organizing And Interpreting Data
Certificate: PEM Bad data are worse than no data. Good data tell a story; it paints a picture. Using numbers means knowing how to organize the data clearly and allowing the numbers to tell the story they have to tell. Deceptive use of numbers involves manipulating the numbers to serve alien interests. Whether evaluating others’ data and conclusions or collecting and interpreting original data, decision makers must know how to see the forest and avoid being led astray among the trees.
Launching and Sustaining Virtual Teams
Certicate: LNV New teams and old are suddenly required to work more or less virtually. Going through a launch process touches on all the critical aspects of being a team, and puts them in the context of what’s new about working virtually. Sustaining teams requires using the right technologies and leadership techniques for project management, motivation, and trust.
Leadership and Coalition-Building
Certificate: PIM Leading means more than managing. You’ll develop new ways to leveraging your strengths and preferences, to build effective teams, and to manage upwards.
Making Virtual Work "Work"
Certificate: LNV Teams working virtually can be remarkably productive, even outperforming groups whose members work side by side. However, you need to learn new rules about how to manage them and you may need to change some assumptions about policy and practice around human resource management and information technologies.
Managing Across the Generations
Certificate: PIM | LNV You'll learn how leading organizations attract, train, communicate with, and motivate youngsters, accommodate the needs of experienced elders, and capture the knowledge of the quickly-retiring Baby Boomers.
Managing Projects with In-House and Outsourced Teams
Certificate: PIM Develop skills in writing and using RFPs, budgeting, scheduling, coordinating responsibilities, and using collaboration technologies to bring successful projects in on time and within budget.
Needs Analysis and Performance Consulting
Certificate: PIM Move beyond being a creative producer to a consultant who identifies and closes business performance gaps, using a set of analytical methods and a wide variety of solutions.
Observation: Classic Principles, Cutting Edge Techniques
Certificate: PEM Given the limits of self-report, decision makers need insight into what stakeholders really do, not just what they say they do. Observation --overt or covert, direct or discovered -- complements other sources of information to provide unique insight and knowledge of behavior. Familiarity with creative and up-to-date methods for observing and interpreting behavior is essential in today’s complicated and competitive environment.
Planning And Executing The Surveys You Really Need
Certificate: PEM Carrying out a survey well is harder than it seems. Properly executed surveys provide valuable data that inform actions; poorly conducted surveys induce costly mistakes. Eliminating systematic bias and random error allows decision makers to profit from survey research. Understanding the key strengths and weaknesses of surveys further enables consumers of information to interpret others’ surveys advantageously.
Beyond ROI: Demonstrating the Value of Communication and Performance Systems
Certificate: PEM | PIM Learn how to calculate the potential and current value of performance improvement systems and projects as they contribute to the intangible asset portfolio and shareholder value of your organization.
Sales Promotion Assessment
Certificate: PEM Sales promotion has always been considered the most measurable of the mass media marketing communication options. Increasingly, sales promotion techniques are being combined with other communication methods, both internally and externally targeted, to increase impact and add a greater degree of assessment.
Strategic Planning
Certificate: PIM Acquire a deeper understanding of strategy concepts and learn to develop a strategic plan that creates alignment with organizational priorities and cultivates influence with senior leadership.
Working with Teams for Innovation
Certificate: LNV Innovation is a team sport. The responsibility for a team's success lies with everyone from the designated team leader to the person on the lowest rung of the hierarchy. Learn how to work with a group of people to foster an environment that promotes creative and productive thinking that then yields innovative solutions.
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