Professional Development Courses and Workshops
Our wide variety of professional development courses can be applied to certificate programs that will help give your career a boost. And because our courses are taught by instructors who are industry experts, you’ll walk away with new knowledge and skills that you can apply at work tomorrow.
Discounts and financial aid may be available to help you pay for your courses. If you have any questions about which courses might be appropriate for you, view frequently asked questions, contact our information center, or visit our student resources page.
Professional Development Course Listing
Click on the + for a full list of available courses within each subject area.
Facility Management Credential Program
Sustainability Facility Professional (SFP) Credential
Officially endorsed by the International Facilities Management Association (IFMA), this intensive course will prepare you for the internationally recognized Sustainability Facilities Professional (SFP) credential exam in just 6 weeks. This credential will aid you as you advance your career by being a leader in facilities management with an internationally recognized credential.
Facilities Management Professional (FMP) Credential
Officially endorsed by the International Facilities Management Association (IFMA), this intensive course prepares you for the internationally recognized Facilities Management Professional (FMP) credential exam in just 8 weeks. This credential will aid you as you advance your career by being a leader in facilities management (FM) with an internationally recognized credential. Includes Operations and Maintenance, Project Management, Finance and Business Essentials, and Leadership and Strategy Essentials courses.
Facilities Management Professional (FMP): Operations and Maintenance
This course addresses operations and maintenance as a whole. It provides insights into the Operations and Maintenance tasks and knowledge so that the facility manager can assess the condition of the facility systems, structure, interiors, exteriors and grounds; manage facility operations and maintenance services; manage occupant services such as custodial, parking and security; develop specifications and performance requirements for services and select the best resources; and measure, manage and plan for performance, efficiency, sustainability and mission-related expectations.
Facilities Management Professional (FMP): Project Management
Facility managers play a major role on all aspects of project management, beginning with planning, scoping, and scheduling, and ending with evaluation. Project planning and management are core skills in facility management. The skills are particularly important because of the wide range of projects assigned to the facility organization. This course introduces the student to critical project management competencies, including initiation, planning, managing and closing projects.
Facilities Management Professional (FMP): Finance and Business Essentials
Due to the ever-changing global environment, finance and business management is a complex undertaking for any manager, not just facility managers. Reduced to its essentials, finance and business in facility management involves being able to manage/oversee the financial management of the facility organization, administering procurement, and administering and managing the finances associated with contracts. This course addresses those critical competencies.
Facilities Management Professional (FMP): Leadership and Strategy Essentials
Leadership and strategy are tool sets that facility managers can use to augment all facility management activities, including project management, operations and maintenance, and finance and business. This course is intended as a toolbox of concepts and ideas that can be applied as needed by facility managers and scaled to fit the needs of the organization to plan strategically, lead and manage the facility organization, and provide leadership for the entire organization.
Management, Supervision, and Leadership
Principles of Supervision
Meet the challenge of supervising in today's complex and changing workplace. Discover your authentic style and motivate others towards a more productive work environment.
Build Teamwork and Commitment
Learn to create dynamic, high performance teams by tapping into individuals' diverse skills and interests to encourage a shared sense of organizational goals.
Delegate to Enhance Job Performance
Learn what, when, and how to delegate. Managing versus doing makes you and your employees more effective.
Developing Leadership Skills
Develop your leadership potential by enhancing your influencing, communication, and coaching skills and learn to differentiate between management and leadership.
Coaching for Excellence
Develop the tools and explore the approaches that are critical in a coaching relationship.
Strategic Planning and Measurement
Develop tools to build strategies that lead to practical solutions that make your business stronger.
Leading Change
Learn the structure of change and how to work with it to make you and your team's transitions smoother and more productive.
Interviewing and Selection Processes
Identify the most qualified candidates for your organization, while making sure that you are conducting the interviewing and hiring processes both legally and effectively.
Legal Issues for Supervisors and Managers
Understand the legal aspects of employee-supervisor relationships and the role in supporting these relationships.
Financial Intelligence
Learn how financial information is used to make internal decisions and communicate with stakeholders.
Manage Performance and Develop Talent
Build the performance climate that your employees need to achieve stellar results.
Writing Business Reports and Proposals
Learn how to write concise, professional reports that effectively inform and persuade readers.
Measuring and Improving Work Processes
Begin the journey toward Six Sigma performance simply by enhancing your organization's current process improvement techniques.
In-Depth Coaching: Lead Individual Change Interventions
Understand and leverage your role as a coach to create and sustain individual and organization change.
Successful Manager's Leadership Program
Develop leadership excellence with this high-impact program and learn the key skills and behaviors that contribute to the success of today's managers and leaders.
Lead Successful Team Intervention Strategies
Learn how to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, responsiveness and innovativeness of teams through the practical techniques used to facilitate team intervention strategies.
Successfully Lead Enterprise-Wide Change Management
Learn effective techniques and systems that facilitate change and explore the dynamic role of today's change manager.
Management Essentials for Success
Increase your personal effectiveness and the performance of your work group by learning how to address management challenges and gain an understanding of key functions of management.
Customer Focused Marketing
Learn to compete in today's competitive market through marketing planning, understanding your customer, delivering your message, and evaluating your success.
Writing and Communication
Successfully Deal with Conflict at Work
Help improve your confidence and effectiveness in managing conflict by developing strategies to respond to difficult situations and build valuable skills for positively resolving conflict.
How to Deal with Difficult People
Develop the interpersonal and communication skills you need to recognize and respond to difficult behavior in coworkers, employees, supervisors, and the public.
Negotiate for Agreement
Develop your negotiation skills by learning to apply proven strategies and techniques to everyday situations as you learn about the negotiation process.
Deliver High Impact Presentations
Develop powerful speaking and presentation skills and enhance your natural speaking style as you improve the content and delivery of your presentations.
Handle People with Tact and Diplomacy
Bring out the best in people and learn how to build and maintain interpersonal relationships that affect your job performance.
Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Skills
Improve your face-to-face communication skills by learning how to say what you mean, describe feelings, and deal with difficult communication situations in a professional manner.
Work Assertively
Focus on understanding other people's needs and perspectives and learn how to confront problem behavior, stand up for yourself, and interact with authority figures.
Exercise Organizational Influence
Garner support from those you work with and hone your ability to influence others effectively for the improvement of the entire organization.
Foundations in Business Writing
Learn how to improve your writing by practicing helpful strategies for organizing and formatting business correspondence and materials.
Writing Persuasive Business Proposals
Learn how to write compelling proposals that meet the needs of the sponsors and stakeholders who will use them.
Writing Business Reports and Proposals
Learn how to write concise, professional reports that effectively inform and persuade readers.
Increase Power and Influence through Listening
Develop and hone listening skills to increase your workplace effectiveness.
Writing Policies and Procedures
Learn how to plan, write, edit, and publish successful policies, procedures, manuals and directions that align with your company's values.
Writing for the Web
Understand how people use the web to acquire the tools to take a marketing approach in writing effective web site copy.
Technical Writing
Meet the needs of your audience, accomplish your goals, and write for precision, clarity, and style.
Advanced Editing and Proofreading Strategies
Learn how to hone editing and proofreading skills to maximize professionalism and quality.
Business Grammar Update
Learn to apply current guidelines for the most practical correctness rules, the ones that everyone relies on daily. You will learn to write with far fewer errors, whether writing simple emails or complex reports.
Emotional Intelligence for Professional Success
Increase your emotional intelligence skills to respond positively to the emotions of others, manage stress, strengthen relationship skills, foster trust, and produce better results.
Achieve Results Through Personal Power and Leadership
Learn to communicate more effectively and leverage your personal leadership style to play a vital role in your organization's success.
Project Management
Negotiate for Agreement
Develop your negotiation skills by learning to apply proven strategies and techniques to everyday situations as you learn about the negotiation process.
Project Planning
Focus on creating a detailed project plan that defines activities, schedule, communication, solicitation, and procurement to create an integrated project plan.
Project Initiation
Learn how to communicate with stakeholders, analyze the organization, develop a budget and identify roles and responsibilities during the critical planning stages of your projects.
Project Management Foundations
Begin by understanding what a project is, how you can improve your role as a better project manager, while building a solid foundation of the project management essentials.
Project Risk Management
Learn to encourage a trust based context for handling uncertainty through project risk management planning while gaining knowledge to monitor and control risk on a project effectively.
Project Execution
Learn to manage a project in progress while accommodating the impact of inevitable changes and events on the triple constraints of schedule, budget and scope.
Project Control and Closure
Learn how to manage the strategies that project managers need to control and finally close a project successfully.
Project Leadership
Discover strategies to mold and motivate your project team through team building and for solid decision-making.
Project Procurement Management
Learn to obtain goods and services from outside companies as part of your project.
Project Management and Chaos Theory
Understand complex systems and chaos, how they manifest in your organization, and learn to develop strategies for managing stress and minimizing risk due to this chaos.
Applied Project Management
Put into practice the skills you have acquired throughout Essential Project Management Certificate program. Work as a team to successfully initiate, plan, execute, control and close a mid-sized, high-priority project.
Project Management and New Product Development
Acquire the key success factors in new product develoment, and discover ways to bring those factors to bear in your own organization.
Technical Writing
Meet the needs of your audience, accomplish your goals, and write for precision, clarity, and style.
Business Acumen
Comprehend and evaluate business problems and solutions to become a strategic business partner in your organization.
Business Acumen for Technical Professionals
Think like a CEO—treat projects as business profits to increase profitability and promote strategic growth.
Human Resources
Staffing: Recruitment and Selection
Explore strategies and techniques to find and keep great employees that meet your organization's needs.
Principles of Employee Compensation
Learn the key components of a compensation plan, laws impacting compensation, use of salary survey data, and factors in a successful compensation program.
Deliver High Impact Presentations
Develop powerful speaking and presentation skills and enhance your natural speaking style as you improve the content and delivery of your presentations.
Employee Benefits Practices and Trends
Equip yourself to respond effectively to employee concerns and opportunities with this comprehensive introduction to benefit practices and trends.
Performance Management Process
Examine the components of an effective performance management strategy and understand the connection between organizational and individual performance.
Design On-Boarding Programs
Gain valuable tips on creating new employee orientation programs that influence a new employee's performance, attitude and sense of commitment.
Legal Issues in Human Resources and Management
Gain an understanding of key issues in employment law with practical guidance for risk avoidance and risk management.
Investigations and Documentation
Gain practical techniques for conducting investigations, gathering information legally, maintaining objectivity and keeping accurate records.
The Human Resource Audit
Conduct compliance reviews and evaluate human resource practices using audit techniques, data analysis and action planning.
Strategic Human Resource Planning
Learn to plan using environmental data to identify strategic challenges and objects, then develop and deploy an action plan to meet your goals.
Employee and Labor Relations
Learn how employee labor relations relate to the legal context of employee relations and gain a greater understanding of your role in employee advocacy.
Legal Issues for Supervisors and Managers
Understand the legal aspects of employee-supervisor relationships and the role in supporting these relationships.
Introduction to Human Resource Practices
Examine the variety of human resource functions performed and integrate these with the major human resource principles and concepts.
Organizational Training and Development
Understand the key components of organizational training and development to help attain your business goals.
HR Certification Test Prep
Participate in the SHRM Learning System with your human resource colleagues to prepare you for the internationally recognized Professional in Human Resources (PHR) or the Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) designation.
HR Certification Test Prep Online
To obtain Web access, you must register online. Your username and password will be included in your registration confirmation; please print a copy for your records.
Project Management Foundations
Begin by understanding what a project is, how you can improve your role as a better project manager, while building a solid foundation of the project management essentials.
Fundamentals of Organization Development
Prepare individuals and groups within your organization to adapt to new technologies, markets, challenges and change.
In-Depth Coaching: Lead Individual Change Interventions
Understand and leverage your role as a coach to create and sustain individual and organization change.
Lead Successful Team Intervention Strategies
Learn how to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, responsiveness and innovativeness of teams through the practical techniques used to facilitate team intervention strategies.
Successfully Lead Enterprise-Wide Change Management
Learn effective techniques and systems that facilitate change and explore the dynamic role of today's change manager.
Business Acumen
Comprehend and evaluate business problems and solutions to become a strategic business partner in your organization.
Assess Training Needs
Assess training needs and analyze performance improvement solutions
Create Dynamic Webinars
Design learning-centered, engaging training webinars
Deliver High-Impact Training
Acquire critical skills to engage learners and deliver high-impact training presentations
Measure Training Results
Apply several evaluation techniques to measure the impact of training
Design and Develop Training Solutions
Use instructional design principles to develop performance improvement solutions
HR Certification Test Preparation
HR Certification Test Prep
Participate in the SHRM Learning System with your human resource colleagues to prepare you for the internationally recognized Professional in Human Resources (PHR) or the Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) designation.
HR Certification Test Prep Online
To obtain Web access, you must register online. Your username and password will be included in your registration confirmation; please print a copy for your records.
Business Processes and Analysis
Process Mapping and Analysis
Gain a global perspective on the many processes that drive an organization by mapping and analyzing them for the purpose of managing them more successfully.
Data and Process Modeling
Learn to elaborate, refine, and organize all components of the requirements into succinct, yet meaningful documentation.
Introduction to Business Analysis
Acquire an initial foundation of knowledge of business analysis and the critical role of the business analyst as a bridge between business and IT solution providers.
Managing Business Requirements
Learn requirements management concepts, different forms of requirements and ways to document business requirements.
Measuring and Improving Work Processes
Begin the journey toward Six Sigma performance simply by enhancing your organization's current process improvement techniques.
Process Innovation
Learn to create sustainable operational excellence by combining innovative process designs with streamlined operations.
Implementing Process Change
Make it work in the real world
Business Analysis Certificate - Online
Accelerate the completion of your certificate. Register for the Online Business Analysis Certificate in one easy transaction and complete the certificate entirely online in six weeks. In addition, you pay only $1,850.
Business Process Modeling and Analysis
Link the right business process model to your project requirements and activities.
Use Case Fundamentals
Learn how to leverage Use Cases as part of the requirements process. In this course you will discover effective applications of Use Cases and when to use them. This course will look at Business and System Use Cases, basic Use Case constructs, as well as practical and insightful workshops to give you the confidence to use Use Cases.
Business Analysis Planning
Effective business analysis approaches that influence project work
Income Tax
Income Tax Short Course
The 2012 Income Tax Short Course is offered at multiple locations throughout Minnesota. It will cover many topics of interest including new legislation, financial distress, basis of assets, recapture provisions, retirement, and a variety of income tax issues that affect individual tax payers and arise in operating a business. For more details check out our website: www.cce.umn.edu/tax
The 2010 Income Tax Short Course covers many topics of interest, including new legislation, financial distress, basis of assets, recapture provisions, retirement (with a focus on Roth IRAs) and a variety of income tax issues that affect individual tax payers and arise in operating a business. If you can't attend the Income Tax Short Course in person, register here to receive the course materials.
The 2010 Income Tax Short Course will cover a variety of income tax issues that affect individual tax payers and small businesses. This is a convenient way to earn your CPEs if you can't attend a course. To obtain Web access, you must register online. Your username and password will be included in your registration confirmation; please print a copy for your records.
Engineering
Aerosol and Particle Measurement Short Course
This course includes information on air pollution, industrial hygiene, and nanoparticle technology, as well as aerosol sampling and measurement for bioaerosol, cleanroom, and contamination control. It covers both fundamentals and applications to meet the growing demand of professionals for training in the aerosol field.
Bioaerosol Measurement Short Course
The objective of this course is to provide information and hands-on training for individuals who are interested in bioaerosol measurement instrumentation, protocols, capabilities, and limitations in both laboratory and field settings.
Asphalt Pavement Maintenance and Preservation
This workshop provides an overview of the available technology and tools that make implementing a pavement preservation program feasible.
Coating Process Fundamentals Short Course
This course provides coating engineers and their co-workers with an understanding of the principles of the many processes by which liquid coatings are applied and solidified.
Concrete Pavement Rehabilitation
This workshop covers all aspects of rehabilitation for concrete pavement, concrete curb and gutter, and median sidewalk pavement.
Minnesota Power Systems Conference
This conference provides electric utility engineers and consultants the opportunity to stay abreast of today's power system technology. The conference emphasizes the unique challenges faced by electric utilities in the Midwest. The conference also serves as a forum for power engineers to meet with their colleagues from other utilities to discuss mutual concerns.
Engineering Refresher for Civil Engineers (CE 5)
Review of civil engineering fundamentals required to pass the Minnesota Professional Engineering Examination.
Fundamentals of Engineering Review (IOFT 1)
Course prepares engineering graduates for the Fundamentals of Engineering Examination.
Gravel Roads Maintenance and Design
Workshop helps supervisory personnel and operators better understand the materials, techniques, and equipment needed for maintaining gravel roads, and review new techniques and ideas in gravel road maintenance.
Refresher Course for Electrical Engineers (EE1)
A review of electrical engineering fundamentals required to pass the Minnesota Engineering Examination in Electrical Engineering.
Reforming Electric Energy Systems Curriculum Workshop
This workshop focuses on reforming the electric energy systems curriculum to be forward-looking with an emphasis on renewables/storage, smart delivery, and efficient end-use.
Spring Maintenance Training Expo
This event focuses on spring and summer roadway maintenance issues. The expo showcases the latest equipment and technology occurring in maintenance operations in Minnesota.
Structural Engineering Seminar Series
The series addresses specific structural issues, principles, and concerns in the design and construction of buildings, bridges, and other structures.
Managing Complex Projects: Systems Engineering Online
This course will provide an introduction to systems engineering, including the integration of system life cycle requirements. It is intended to advance understanding of the role of collaborative processes used to manage the development of complex systems and to provide a framework linking stakeholder needs, business strategy, and technology.
