Neal has created and continues to create online courses that address the hottest topics in the workplace and on projects. He develops these courses in collaboration with Velociteach—a highly respected and bellwether PM training company. Velociteach, via their proprietary InSite delivery system, provides a cutting-edge mobile-learning environment that offers the most compelling online learning available.
The online courses are fun, convenient and information-filled courses that can be taken whenever, wherever and whatever your pace. It’s up to you! If you want to be the best, build the best products, offer the best services and work in the best organization, then it all starts with you. These courses are essential in helping you become the very best you can be—whether it’s about developing your leadership and professional skills, personal skills or achieving the elusive work-life balance.
Many of the online courses are presented in bundles that offer an automatic discount. Here are the 3 bundles and their links to learn more:
Neal Whitten 5-Course Series – Save 15% (16.5 PDUs)
- Are You Too Soft?
- Behaviors that Lead to Exceptional Performance
- Behaviors to Master When Dealing with Your Leaders
- What Makes a Team Member Valuable?
- Escalate Is Not a Dirty Word
Neal Whitten’s Personal Develop Series: A Better You – Save 15% (13 PDUs)
- Dealing with Difficult People: 25 Tips to Stay in Control
- 25 Actions to Build Your Self-Confidence
- Self-Assessing and Improving Your Performance Maturity
- Effective Mentoring: Top 40 Q&As for a Successful Experience
Neal Whitten’s Professional Development Series: Achieving Project Success – Save 15% (11 PDUs)
- 17 Top Reasons Why projects Fail – and What You Can Do to Avoid Failure
- Build a Better Team: 54 Real-Life Scenarios
- Top 10 Mistakes in Conducting Lessons Learned
Here is the list of online courses. To learn more, see their descriptions and links below. Enjoy!
- 17 Top Reasons Why Projects Fail and What You Can Do to Avoid Failure (6 PDUs: Power Skills 2, Business Acumen 4)
- Are You Too Soft? (2.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
- Behaviors that Lead to Exceptional Performance (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
- Behaviors to Master When Dealing with Your Leaders (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
- Escalate Is Not a Dirty Word (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
- What Makes a Team Member Valuable? (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
- Self-Assessing and Improving Your Performance Maturity (3 PDUs: Power Skills)
- Achieving the Elusive Work-Life Balance (2.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
- Dealing with Difficult People: 25 Tips to Stay in Control (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
- 25 Actions to Build Your Self-Confidence (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
- Top 10 Mistakes in Conducting Lessons Learned (2 PDUs: Power Skills)
- Effective Mentoring: Top 40 Q&As for a Successful Experience (3 PDUs: Power Skills 1.5, Business Acumen 1.5)
- Build a Better Team: 54 Real-Life Scenarios (3 PDUs: Power Skills 2, Business Acumen 1)
- Surveying Client Satisfaction: Gauging Project Success (3 PDUs: Business Acumen)
- Effective Time Management to Getting More Done Every Day (3 PDUs: Power Skills)
- How to Lead Successful Change Management (2.25 PDUs: Business Acumen)
- Essential Tips for Effective Negotiations Skills (2 PDUs: Ways of Working)
- Crash Course in Agile Scrum (3 PDUs: Ways of Working)
- 7 Steps to Successful Conflict Management (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
- Drive Innovation with Disruptive Thinking (3.5 PDUs: Business Acumen)
Here are the online course descriptions and their links so you can learn more.
17 Top Reasons Why Projects Fail and What You Can Do to Avoid Failure (6 PDUs: Power Skills 2, Business Acumen 4)
Project failure is expensive to your organization and to your career. This course will reveal the most prevalent causes of project failure and will show you what you can do to avoid the reason for failure by going after the root causes. Not surprisingly, the project manager is almost always a major factor for success or failure of a project. This course is so important to project and program managers, it should be mandatory for all project and program managers—whether new or experienced. For new project managers, the course will be eye opening and can save their projects from potential crash and burn. If you are an experienced project manager, the course is a great refresher to help you be your best—and stay there. Although the course is primarily focused on IT projects, the lessons are relevant to all industries and all projects. This course and its takeaway exhibits can be a game changer for your career.
Are You Too Soft? (2.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
Most project managers—most leaders—are not consistently willing to make the tough and unpopular project-related decisions, even though their instincts warn them that they are not taking the most effective action. Witness 15 examples of project manager actions (or inactions) that are indicative of too-soft behavior. The examples discussed include: Behaving as if there is little or no authority to support your responsibility, lax in holding project members accountable for their commitments and actions, delaying asking for help when needed, evading taking a position on an issue rather than risk alienating project members, avoiding or excessively delaying making key decisions, and many more. Will you recognize familiar behavior? Learn how to overcome being too soft and thereby becoming a more effective leader.
Behaviors that Lead to Exceptional Performance (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
Success does not just happen—it is made to happen! Success is born of behaviors and choices that lead to exceptional performance. Neal reveals 18 important leading-edge, best-practice, results-oriented behaviors that will promote your professional and personal success. Topics include: Priority management, think for yourself, integrity, never avoid necessary confrontation, practice boldness and courage, trust but verify, don’t make it or take it personally, don’t dwell on yesterday, think like a leader, and many more. As you strive to achieve your dreams, these behaviors can lay the foundation for your journey.
Behaviors to Master When Dealing with Your Leaders (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
Your leaders want you to know—need you to know—the behaviors they consistently expect from you. Just because you have a leadership role doesn’t mean you are living up to their expectations. Not only will Neal identify what your boss expects from you, he will articulate what you expect from those under your direction. The 18 behaviors revealed include: Don’t dump and run, make it brief, offer professional criticism, bring solutions with problems, wear one face, and many more. Learn how you can enhance your image, effectiveness and career while making your leaders look good—which makes you look good. Talk about a win-win!
Escalate Is Not a Dirty Word (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
When two parties cannot agree on the resolution of an issue then that issue must be raised to higher levels of leadership to ensure its resolution receives the sense of urgency and importance it deserves. Done right, escalations are a highly effective and important business tool in any organization. This course will show you when and how to escalate, reveal why escalations are a good business tool, provide handy guidelines to follow in conducting effective escalations, walk you through completed exercises that demonstrate the steps to follow, reveal when an escalation is over, and answer frequently asked questions about conducting escalations.
What Makes a Team Member Valuable? (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
If you were building a team and could hand pick its members, what are the key attributes that you would seek? Team members need to know the behaviors and actions expected of them that will help them to perform at their best, as well as help the team to perform at its best. Neal reveals 16 key behaviors and actions that include: Fully participate, be truthful, be reliable, maintain a positive attitude, focus on solutions, share knowledge, practice being proactive, practice continuous improvement, and many more. This course provides a highly important shared vision that you can promote with your team.
Self-Assessing and Improving Your Performance Maturity (3.0 PDUs: Power Skills)
What is your performance maturity? Are you the leader, team member or employee you most want to be? Are you looking for a means to assess your performance maturity and then focus on the improvement areas that can benefit you the most? Then look no further. This course was created for you! Included in the course is an assessment instrument that will determine your performance maturity score. You will identify your inhibitions that are holding you back and identify the top behaviors with which to focus. You will create active Performance Improvement Plans for your focused behaviors and be shown how to routinely improve and fine tune your performance.
Achieving the Elusive Work-Life Balance (2.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
If you have difficulty in juggling the demands of your job and your non-work life, you’re not alone. Many people feel like their lives are overcommitted and see no relief in sight. Nowadays work-life balance can seem like an unrealistic objective and can seem more elusive than ever. I have personally wrestled with my own work-life balance issues for most of my adult life but—as a senior-aged person—I have learned a massive amount of knowledge and, dare I say, wisdom, about the highly important subject of finding a satisfactory harmony across all aspects of life. I have also read the research and musings from many valuable contributors that have opened my eyes even wider on maintaining a healthy work-life balance. My mission here is to sift through the data and present to you meaningful information that can help you not only better understand your work-life balance but to give you ideas that can help you achieve the integration that is most important to you.
Dealing with Difficult People: 25 Tips to Stay in Control (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
We all encounter difficult people in the workplace. We may be that way ourselves from time to time. How effective you are at dealing with difficult people has a direct impact on how successful you become and can affect your job advancement, your relationships, your overall confidence and even your health. This course defines 25 actions that you can employ to stay in control. By demonstrating self-control, you are better prepared for dealing with almost any situation and any individual. Stuff’s going to happen but you don’t have to accept being the victim. You have choices.
25 Actions to Build Your Self-Confidence (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
Almost everyone suffers from low self-confidence at some time; while many people struggle with self-confidence issues regularly. Low self-confidence will hold you back from achieving your potential. It can cause you to miss out on many opportunities and leave you with a less happy, satisfying and fulfilling life. The good news? Self-confidence can be learned, practiced and become a core part of who you choose to be. This course will show you how and presents 25 actions that can build your self-confidence. Mastering self-confidence can change the rest of your life.
Top 10 Mistakes in Conducting Lessons Learned (2.0 PDUs: Power Skills)
Conducting lessons learned is a great method for exposing a project’s strengths and weaknesses. If these lessons are routinely applied to the ongoing project as well as to future projects, a great tool is now in motion for continuous improvement of all that an organization does that affects the success of projects. There is little debate regarding the benefit of lessons learned. However, Neal’s experience, based on his interactions with hundreds of projects and thousands of project managers, is that most lessons learned and their follow-up actions are not conducted in the most effective manner where the business gains an optimal return on its investment. This course will highlight the top 10 mistakes that are the most pervasive and the most harmful in the lessons learned wheelhouse. As a bonus, Neal will reveal many additional common mistakes as an aid to further raise your game in conducting lessons learned.
Effective Mentoring: Top 40 Q&As for a Successful Experience (3.0 PDUs: Power Skills 1.5, Business Acumen 1.5)
The best way to learn the application of a profession, to enhance your personal development or to guide your career is with a mentor by your side when needed. There is no better way! This course guides you through the mentoring dos and don’ts. It focuses on the mentee—the person being mentored—and addresses the most crucial information in achieving a successful mentoring experience. Topics include identifying the benefits of having a mentor, identifying your mentoring goal, finding the right mentor for you, defining the behaviors and actions of both the effective mentee and the effective mentor, defining a productive mentoring relationship, and identifying common mentoring obstacles to navigate. Mentors can dramatically benefit your performance, career and life.
Build a Better Team: 54 Real-Life Scenarios (3.0 PDUs: Power Skills 2, Business Acumen 1)
This course provides 54 short scenarios that are designed for team building. Each scenario is described within a few sentences and presented with multiple-choice options. Recommended answers are provided. The scenarios and answers provide great content for team discussion and agreement so that the team can learn to operate at its highest level and perform in the best interests of the business. These real-life scenarios likely represent many of the team issues you may now be experiencing.
Surveying Client Satisfaction: Gauging Project Success (3 PDUs: Business Acumen)
Client Satisfaction Surveys are surprisingly not commonly utilized on most projects. Based on their value in influencing the success of a project and increasing the likelihood of the success of the resulting product or service being created, these surveys are clearly a missed opportunity. This course demystifies Client Satisfaction Surveys and shows you how to create and implement surveys during a project and at the completion of a project. As a project manager, if you do not routinely survey your clients for feedback, then you cannot really know what they think about your performance, the project’s progress and whether or not you are meeting their expectations.
Effective Time Management to Getting More Done Every Day (3.0 PDUs: Power Skills)
Success at work and in your life overall is largely not about how much time you have but how you invest the time you have. Would you like to hone your time management skills? Are you looking for that edge that allows you to complete work in less time, get more done each day, waste less time, find more free time, take control of your day, improve your reputation and lower your stress? This course is loaded with ideas to help you make the best use of your time. Effective time management can significantly and positively affect the rest of your life; it’s truly a game changer.
How to Lead Successful Change Management (2.25 PDUs: Business Acumen)
The need for change management—also referred to as organizational change management—for businesses to keep up or even survive is unprecedented. Agility is essential. Changing strategies, processes, systems, staff roles and responsibilities, cultures, customer relationships and organizations, to name a few, require effective change management to implement. The companies that are able to adapt quickly will experience a competitive advantage, those that cannot will fall behind. Most change initiatives fail. But this course was designed to reverse that statistic by introducing you to an effective change management model and revealing critical foundational tenets that support successful change management initiatives.
Essential Tips for Effective Negotiation Skills (2 PDUs: Ways of Working)
Negotiating is a fundamental skill that you use virtually every day. It plays a critical role both in the success of your career and your life outside of work. Every day you negotiate with your co-workers, with businesses, friends and family. For many, negotiating can seem confrontational, intimidating and frankly a daunting task. However, with this course, you learn the most important tips to adopt to become an effective negotiator. When you become a better negotiator and see that nearly everything in life is negotiable, it opens your possibilities for a more fulfilling life.
Crash Course in Agile Scrum (3 PDUs: Ways of Working)
What is Agile Scrum? What are the primary terms that define Scrum? What is a Scrum Master, a Product Owner? How does a Scrum Team operate? What are the 12 steps in implementing a successful Scrum project? This course answers these questions and so many more. This course can help you dive into a popular and effective framework for getting work done in small, quick Increments, providing customer value with each successive Increment, using small self-organized, self-initiated, highly adaptive and closely collaborated teams, while promoting steadfast continuous improvement. Whew! That was a mouthful. But Scrum really can provide many benefits over traditional frameworks.
7 Steps to Successful Conflict Management (3.5 PDUs: Power Skills)
Conflict is a natural part of the workplace environment. It is so common that you likely will experience some level of conflict many times a week if you find yourself in constant contact with people. How you deal with conflict has a significant impact on your opportunities, career and destiny. It also is a major factor to an organization’s success or its failure. This online course prepares you for successfully resolving conflict by introducing you to the causes and need for conflict; revealing 5 conflict management strategies; listing the ground rules for negotiating conflict; describing 7 steps to successfully resolve any conflict; identifying actions you can take to change the conflict culture in your organization; and so much more. Conflicts are opportunities to build stronger teams and organizations.
Drive Innovation with Disruptive Thinking (3.5 PDUs: Business Acumen)
We live in the most disruptive time in human history. Even the best minds are unable to predict the changes just a few years out. But change will happen. Will you choose to be part of the revolution or will you and your career be run over by it? Disruptive innovative thinking is widely viewed to be the most valuable commodity in today’s business world. There is a constant need to upend the norms and implement new, fresh and creative ideas. This course introduces you to disruptive innovative thinking; gives examples of disruptive companies; reveals why many companies suffer harmful disruption; lists the characteristics of a disruptive innovative thinker; identifies actions your company can pursue to spur disruptive innovation; and so much more. This course helps you and your company prepare for a successful disruptive ride ahead. Better to be the disruptor than the disrupted.