Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Will an eCornell Certificate in Project Leadership result in career advancement?

I put the following message at the bottom of most of my posts on this blog -

"Thank you for your time! If you have any questions about my experience with the eCornell Project Leadership classes, please email me at lisson@gmail.com"

The most frequent question I receive in my email box is a version of - "Has a Certificate in Project Leadership resulted in career advancement?"

I believe earning my Certificate in Project Leadership was a good decision for me, because it helped me fulfill my goals.

I wanted my employer to know that I was interested in learning and growing as an employee. I am not just here to punch a time clock and earn a paycheck. Investing my time and money in ongoing education from eCornell has broadcast that message loud and clear.

I wanted to learn skills that would make my job easier, more rewarding and more productive. The tools and strategies I learned in my eCornell Project Leadership classes have helped me to properly manage my time and better handle conflict with coworkers.

I wanted to contribute to my workplace in new ways. As a result of ideas we worked with in class and supplemental reading, I have become a more proactive employee, submitting ideas that would improve employee morale and make existing teamwork more effective.

Earning my Certificate in Project Leadership from eCornell has given me a higher quality of life when it comes to dealing with teams at my place of employment and in my personal life.

I welcome other alumni of eCornell classes to share the reasons why they took the eCornell classes and their post-Certificate employer experiences!

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Upcoming Cornell webinar on Hotels and Social Media

Cornell is holding an interesting looking webinar providing information on how hotels can use their social media data more effectively with an eye toward better understanding their customers and improving their company.

These are the details, according to my copy of the eCornell Career Advantage newsletter:

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Drive Profits & Improve Decisions with Social Media Analytics
Speakers:
Steve Levigne, Vice President, McDonald's Corporation
Bill Carroll, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Cornell School of Hotel Administration
Kelly A. McGuire, PhD, Practice Director, Hospitality & Travel Global Practice, SAS

April 15, 2011 @ 11am Eastern / 8am Pacific

Join us for this session focusing on how hotels and casinos can turn the volumes of social media data they’ve collected into meaningful and profitable information. Our panel will discuss how advanced analytics is the key to transforming volumes of unstructured text data into insight about operations, revenue and guest interactions that can be shared across the enterprise.

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The sign up page is here: http://www.sas.com/reg/web/corp/1185088


Thank you for your time! If you have any questions about my experience with the eCornell Project Leadership classes, please email me at lisson@gmail.com

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Better by Atul Gawande - How to Improve Performance

In the book, 'Better,' Atul Gawande, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, offers five suggestions for "becoming a positive deviant."

Ask an Unscripted Question
Don't Complain
Count Something
Write Something, and
Change

Of these five, my favorite is Count Something. By taking charge of quantifying the effectiveness of my work, I can become and experiment of one and find ways to improve my own best performance.

I rely on counting something far more as a runner than I do at my workplace. How can I bring the lessons I have learned in improving my running performance to my job?

This book inspired me with stories of how health care facilities around the world have innovated in achieving their mission of improving performance - of becoming Better.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

New Cornell Certificate -Marketing Strategy for Business Leaders

I received this message from the eCornell Alumni group on LinkedIn:

New Program Announcement:
Marketing Strategy for Business Leaders

eCornell’s newest online certificate program is "Marketing Strategy for Business Leaders" (see http://tinyurl.com/4ra8f3h ). This 6-course program provides the MBA-level marketing concepts and tools leaders and managers need to make informed decisions and set direction for their company, business unit, department or product line:

* Marketing Concept & Strategy Essentials
* Applied Marketing Concepts & Decision-Making Tools
* Marketing Research & Analysis
* Brand Equity: Creating & Communicating the Value of Your Brand
* New Product Successes & Failures
* Distribution Strategy & International Marketing

Request more information about this new program--including program start dates--at http://www.ecornell.com/l-marketing