Are you looking to start a career in Applied Leadership or just brush up on your Applied Leadership skills? Look no further — for this post, we’ve dived into the Apalla Alexandria catalog to bring you the top 3 free courses, or MOOCs, to learn Applied Leadership.
Introduction to Project Management
Project management is an essential skill-set for many careers and in many contexts in our lives. Introduction to Project Management is an ideal starting point if you need to manage projects at work or at home, while not necessarily being a formally trained project manager. It is also suitable if you are considering undertaking a project in the near future and are seeking to learn and apply essential project management knowledge and skills.
To deliver a project successfully, it’s important to start by clearly identifying what the project is, and what its outcomes will be. In the course, we will show you practical ways to explore and understand your goals from the outset of your project, and to consider all the factors that may affect its execution. Step by step you will learn how to plan, scope, schedule, cost and manage your project from beginning to end. Since every project relies on the people who are delivering it, the course also enables you to explore how you can effectively communicate, manage people and employ leadership skills to successfully deliver your own project.
In Introduction to Project Management, you will learn practical ways to use project management skills, whether your project is large or small. Join us to explore how you can benefit from using project management techniques in your own projects.
Applied Scrum for Agile Project Management
Scrum and Agile are often considered synonymous, and there is a good reason. Scrum embodies the simplest and most pure approach to managing project work at the team level. Scrum is employed by over half of all Agile practitioners across all industries. While agile may have started in software development, many industries now use an agile methodology to deliver their work. The basis for agile, the agile manifesto, extends well beyond its origins in extreme programming and agile software development. Development teams around the world are now using kanban boards and assigning strong product owners to direct self-organizing teams to deliver on prioritized product backlogs. And nearly every new product has some sort of IT component and goes through an agile development lifecycle.
- Today nearly 100% of IT organizations use Agile and many other industries are quickly following;
- The likelihood of being on a Scrum or Scrum-like project is quickly approaching 50/50 or better over time.
While the Mastering Agile Professional Certificate program emphasizes principles at the heart of all Agile frameworks, in this course we start by learning the key project management processes, roles, mechanics, and philosophies behind Scrum. This will provide the basis for all understanding Agile in its purest form over four weeks exploring Why, Who, How, and finally What Scrum looks like applied in the real world. From understanding the agile team members, like scrum master and product owner, to the important differences in lean and agile processes.
While this course will not make you an agile certified practitioner (PMI-ACP), or certified scrum master (CSM), it offers a more fundamental agile certification based on agile principles and how scaled agile is applied in industry today. You’ll finish this course more than ready to begin your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on “Sprint Planning for Faster Agile Team Delivery.”
Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).
Agile Leadership Principles and Practices
Agile can often challenge project managers in the realm of leadership. Old styles of command-control are now a thing of the past, except for the most conservative organizations. While good leaders employ a variety of leadership skills and leadership styles to motivate team members, even this is not enough. Simply setting a common goal and maintaining positive attitudes while raising your emotional intelligence will make you a better leader; but will it truly unlock your team’s potential?
Instead of leadership traits, Agile leadership emphasizes facilitation and communication skills. This is teachable and much more powerful. This unique and effective leadership style challenges traditional beliefs in what leadership means.
Great leaders understand that the leader can no longer stand in the way of their team. Modern society, mindsets, and global competition demand new leadership roles, and leadership qualities all together that empower and motivate the team to new levels of productivity. Business leaders that miss this critical shift in leadership styles concede a powerful competitive advantage to the Agile leader.
In this course, you will learn how this new style of leadership redefines and redistributes team roles by:
- Motivating through empowerment to gain better decisions
- Facilitating the creativity and inclusivity of a high-functioning team
- Identifying and managing decision making biases
- Negotiating conflicts across individuals, teams, and organizations
- Ensuring success through delegation and powerful constraint-based metrics.
- You’ll learn to turn one internally motivated and critically thinking mind into many; and driving speed and innovation through leveraging all talents on the team.
While this course will not make you an agile certified practitioner (PMI-ACP), or certified scrum master (CSM), it offers a more fundamental agile certification based on agile principles and how agile leadership is applied in industry today. You’ll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on Agile Process, Project, and Program Controls.
Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).
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In conclusion, these are the top 3 free courses to learn Applied Leadership. Whether you are just starting out or looking to refresh your skills, these courses are a great way to learn the fundamentals of Applied Leadership. So why wait? Start learning today and take the first step towards a successful career in Applied Leadership.
Interested in more courses, or to expand to new topics? Be sure to check out the rest of the courses available on Apalla Alexandria, or join our community.
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