Professional Development Training Assignment

Worth: 3 points

Format: Individual or group work

Overview

Your assignment this week is to take on the role of people manager and to design leadership training materials that can be used to develop specific skills within a role of your choosing. Your leadership developoment materials can be geared to training people managers, their employees, or whole teams. You could create a role play with discussion questions, a template for a document that is necessary in employee management with instructions for use, or a guide on specific things related to leadership and people management that employees and leaders should know.

Assignment tip: When selecting your topic and the media that is most appropriate for communicating about it, focus on specific skills you’d like to develop and ways of improving the people management experience for everyone.

Assignment requirement: Please get sign-off from the instructor on the topic you’ll address and the text types you’ll use.

Learning Objectives

By completing this assignment, you will:

Learn by teaching
Explore an area of leadership of your choosing
Plan the specific types of texts that you’ll use to communicate about that area to employees, people managers, or both
Develop a training activity suitable for implementation within a larger training program
Deliver training materials to our class team, thereby supporting the class in developing what you believe to be important and relevant leadership skills

Step-by-step Instructions

Step 1: Select your professional development topic

Working individually or in teams, decide what leadership topic you’d like to address, who your training audience will be, and what specific skills or concepts you want them to walk away from your training session with. For instance, the previous page presents an example of a professional development training exercise geared to new managers who need to learn how to run good 1:1 meetings with their direct reports and how to manage the team’s ongoing professional development.

Some topics that you could explore in your session include:

Holding Effective Team Meetings
Developing Listening Skills as a Leader
Navigating Multicultural Views on Leadership
Understanding a Modern Leadership Framework
Taking Control of Your Professional Development Goals
Defining Leadership in General or in a Specific Context

Step 2: Sketch out your session plan

Decide the most effective media and text types to incorporate into your training session, given the topic, the audience, and your training goals.

Some media and text types that you could present in your session include:

Recorded videos of role plays or presentations
Podcast of a longer conversation, for example, on philosophical questions
Simple documents with templates and instructions for carrying out activities
Etc.

✅ Please get the instructor’s approval on your plan prior to proceeding with content development.

Step 3: Develop your training materials

Work together to develop your training materials, working carefully to create a cohesive unit of resources to be used together.

You’ll need to create:

The combination of videos, sound and documents that will be used together to complete the activity
A discussion forum post that advertises your professional development activity to the class

You’ll share these in our discussion forum when you’re ready to deliver.

This week you’ll be sharing your work product with the class so that we all have ample opportunity to do a variety of professional development activities. The forum publication with which you share your training materials with the class needs to follow this format:

Re: Subject line for your post, i.e. the Illustrative Title you've given your training session
By: List the authors' names here

Training Descriptions: In 1-2 sentences, describe what the training is about.

The 'why' behind your design:
- Why did you pick this topic? Why did you design it the way that you did? (2-3 sentences)
- Who is the audience, and why should they choose to do your training session? (2-3 learning outcomes)

Relevant getting started instructions: How do we get started using your materials?
Is there a lesson plan we should follow, for instance?

Access to your materials:
- As attachments
- As links
- As appropriate

Once you have made your forum post, please consider your assignment to have been delivered. The instructor will review your post and reach out for copies of any specific files that she needs.

Please make one post per team! Teams are of course encouraged to comment on their posts!

Step 5: Do the professional development activities

Do the professional development activities by your classmates that interest you on your time. And participate in our Professional Development Day in class next week during which students will deliver their sessions in a live training of the class.

When you do your classmates’ activities:

Follow the instructions and review the training materials
Try to actively learn the concept/skill being taught in the training materials
If you would be so kind, provide feedback on what worked and where the training materials could be improved

Your feedback in the form of comments on the post or DMs to the publishers is greatly appreciate.

Reflection

Once you’ve finished with this assignment, reflect on leadership based upon your experiences this week.

Reflection Questions

What are my leadership skills?
How can I continuing learning about and developing the leadership skills I worked on this week?
What are new leadership skills that I’d like to develop as I think about my current responsibilities and future career transitions?
How can I help more people to development new leadership skills?
Where can I seek help as I go about developing specific leadership skills?
What are my biggest takeaways this week? If I had to identify the biggest ‘gem’ (or standout idea) that I encountered this week, it would be…

Assessment Criteria (3 points total)

Component	Points	Criteria
Topic and Modality Instructor Sign-off	1	• You got your topic and the mode for your materials approved by the instructor.
Audience Awareness & Communication Effectiveness	1	• The materials you’ve developed have a clear audience. • The materials you’ve developed have addressed a need of your specific audience. • The materials you’ve developed are actionable and easy to understand. • The materials you’ve developed help someone learn how to do something important. • It’s clear how to work through the materials. • The different materials created are clearly a part of a cohesive unit.
Presentation & Professionalism	1	• The assignment demonstrates clear signs of positive collaboration, such as following instructions, nuance in analysis, and generally cooperating to deliver a professional product on time. • Professional formatting appropriate to the text type • Error-free writing with proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation • Appropriate length (No more than 5-6 minutes for a video, a half hour for a podcast, shorter documents are generally getter) • Uses inclusive language
Total Points	3

📥 Download this Content

Find this file on our repo and download it.

🤖 GAI Study Prompts

Copy the downloaded content and try it with these prompts:

“What topics or ideas are commonly missed in discussions on leadership that I could cover for my training session?”
“Help me brainstorm 10 ideas for topics I could cover from [this perspective] on leadership in a blog post.”
“I’ve shared my topic and design plan with you, along with the assignment instructions. What could I strengthen about my work to ready it for instructor approval?”
“Given these instructions, do you think my instructor would approve this idea for a leadership training that I have?”
“How have ideas about leadership evolved over time? What practical lessons can we take away from that evolution?”
“What is GAI’s influence on modern conceptions of leadership? Do managers need to meet new readiness checklists that reflects awareness of responsible AI use?”
“Different ways of looking at leadership include identifying people who are seen as leaders, thinking about leadership in international politics, and working on our own professional development as leaders. What are even more ways of thinking about leadership?”
“Help me to do a self assessment of myself as a leader. The self assessment should cover common misconceptions and areas of worry and focus upon identifying gaps while confidence building.”

Unit 4 Complete! Reflect on what you’ve achieved in the Unit 4 - Conclusion.