by Alyssa Janssen
Do you consider yourself to be effective at work? We like to think we’re 100 percent at the top of our game, but all of us have strengths and weaknesses that impact our work.
Tweaking a few skills can help us get more done during the work day, and throughout our careers. Effective workers get exciting projects, win important clients and are well-respected by their colleagues and bosses. How can you become more effective and make sure you don’t miss out on great opportunities? And what should you focus on?
The University offers a wide variety of resources to help you be more effective at work. Below are three free courses available through the University’s learning management system, K@TE (Knowledge and Training Excellence), that will help make your time at work more effective. To access the courses, visit: https://hr.tennessee.edu/eod/online-training/.
Time Management: Planning and Prioritizing Your Time
Managing time effectively entails analyzing goals, breaking those goals into tasks and then prioritizing those tasks. If you set clear and measurable goals and then develop an effective to-do list, you’ll find prioritizing tasks is easier. And, in the end, you’ll manage your time better.
This course focuses on ways to prioritize your workload. It discusses how to prepare a useful to-do list and prioritize the items on it. The course outlines how to sequence and queue tasks to improve your time management. Finally, it describes how to estimate time frames so you can schedule your tasks and meet your deadlines.
Communication Skills
K@TE offers several online and in-person courses to help improve communication skills with co-workers and others you interact with daily. From interpersonal communication to team communication, there are numerous courses to enhance communication skills and improve how you communicate with others.
The courses include “Effective Team Communication,” “Active Listening” and “Writing Effectively.”
Stress and Job Burnout
Sometimes we can feel out-of-sorts at work because we crave a new challenge. This feeling can cause sloppy work, failure to meet deadlines and can lead to hostility and resentfulness toward your work and colleagues. Job burnout goes beyond the occasional bad day or long week. According to Health Guide, a nonprofit public benefit organization, job burnout is a state of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress and can occur when you feel overwhelmed and unable to meet constant demands. Job burnout can lead to poor work habits and harmful physical symptoms, such as panic attacks, headaches and trouble sleeping.
“Optimizing Your Work/Life Balance: Taking Control of Your Stress” seeks to provide employees with skills to effectively manage stress during and after work. This course reviews strategies for coping with stress and avoiding burnout.
No matter your field, learning and developing skills to maintain effectiveness at work and avoid burnout is important. In addition to the resources above, UT offers other employee learning opportunities through HR, such as conferences, online trainings and certificate programs. More on these resources is at: https://hr.tennessee.edu/.
Tags: K@TE, online courses
