free online courses global sportsThe skills, qualities and attitudes needed for success in the jobs market, be it the sports industry or any other, are fast evolving. While there is certainly a role for employers to support your professional development, individuals need to take responsibility for their own skills development. This is because not only will it directly affect your own marketability in the competitive jobs market, but will ensure you are able to keep on top of your job, career and field of expertise as the commercial world around us moves faster than ever. 

It is said that continued learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage in your career journey. Building and developing your skills will improve your performance, build your confidence, open doors and ultimately enable you to reach your personal career goals while increasing your appeal to future employers. 

Here we detail 8 free short courses valuable to all professionals that will help you to take charge of your skills and career development and start building towards your professional goals. 

Develop Your Career Plan 

The chances are that you do not give your career plan the attention it deserves. A clear career plan will enable you to identify and start working towards your goals, providing the clarity and focus that will ultimately lead to career success. It's a critical starting point when looking to kick start your professional development.

If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you can’t
know
where you’re going

This free course from Open Class Rooms will help identify your skills and ambitions while understanding the job market you are focused on and enable you to start building a long term career plan.

Effective Networking 

Networking has always been a skill that some find more easier to develop than others. It's ability to deliver results is however undeniable, never more so than in today's competitive sales and marketing environments.

This super quick 1 hr course offered by Google will help you establish a success orientated networking skill set both online and offline by building your network and personal brand. This skill set will help your achieve more success in your current position or in finding your next job and ultimately help you take control of your career.

Leadership, Teamwork & Negotiation 

Success in the workplace is most definitely defined by these three skills.  Today we work in a more collaborative, goal orientated and demanding environments which requires a mastery of these skills to achieve successful results.

Coursera in partnership with Northwestern University offers this flexible course to help you improve your communicative skills and find your leadership style through self-assessments in which you also develop a game-plan for effective negotiations.

Social Media Management 

Not just for marketeers, social media now plays a central role in business success irrespective of your discipline. An in-demand skill set, building technical and strategic understand of social media ecosystems will help you shape conversation around your business, build loyalty, and attract new customers and partners and much more.

This free Hubspot course will provide you with the skills and recognised certification to use social media to enhance your influence in your current job or increase your employability in the business of sport. 

Project Management

Effective project management is the engine of change in organisations. The digital revolution with it's associated complexity has put project management at the heart of an organisations capacity to deliver future success. It has therefore a critical skill set for many current and particularly future job descriptions.

Lynda provides this certified course as part of a membership, but you can try the first lessons for free. You will learn to manage projects from beginning to end using proven project-management techniques, future proofing your career along the way.

Continued learning is the only sustainable competitive
advantage in your career journey.

Time Management 

There are few professionals that would not benefit from being more productive. With the pressures of modern workflows, being more effective and efficient at work is a skill that will deliver huge rewards to you and your career.   

This free Coursera course focuses on working smarter and being more efficient in your tasks. In just about 4 hours of study you will learn and understand the principles of professional awareness, goal setting, scheduling and time management. 

Storytelling in the workplace

Delivering communications that can engage and influence your target audience will transform you job prospects. Storytelling has become the medium to build effective narratives that provide impact and here you can start building this powerful skill.  

A short, self paced course provided by EdX improves your writing skills, focusing specifically on structure, tone and style in order to create your desired outcome.

Improve your Excel Skills

With data the new currency by which organisations operate, its hard to escape the need to be able to work with data in one form or another. Understanding, managing and reporting on  data sets is a highly desirable digital skill set, one that starts with Microsoft Excel before delving deeper into the ever expanding field of data analytics.  

This Coursera course will help you develop advanced Excel Skills for Business from designing sophisticated spreadsheets to delivering dashboards. Some basic Excel knowledge is required as a prerequisite for this course. 

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