Personal development skills are a hot topic in general right now. A new decade has begun and so potential learners will be thinking about what personal goals and characteristics they want to achieve in 2020 and beyond.
1. Cognitive flexibility
Courses that teach cognitive flexibility might teach new ways of thinking, how to improve memory, how to think on your feet and speak and act in an impromptu manner with confidence, and how to take communication skills to a higher level among other topics. Other options for topic content could be how to embrace diversity of thinking, transfer skills to new areas and take risks.
2. Negotiation and Influencing
With all of the information “noise” out there, negotiation and the ability to influence outcomes are personal skills that people think will be useful and in demand. In the business world, negotiation and influence is critical in many areas – with suppliers, customers, co-workers, employees, etc.
3. Personal Leadership Skills
At it’s core personal leadership is about taking responsibility for being the best you can be and living the best life you can. It’s also about being a role model and leading others to do the same. For example, a mother running a parent-teacher association needs to be able to lead by example. A father coaching a Little League team will need leadership skills to manage all those squawking competitive parents.
4. Organization
People are craving order, so give them tools and personal development skills to achieve it in the form of a genuinely helpful course. You could develop your own system and set of organizational skills as it applies to a particular situation. You could teach lessons on productivity and goal setting.
5. Job Hunting
The workplace is changing rapidly as is the many ways to find and apply for jobs. It can be hard in this age of LinkedIn, Glassdoor.com, online skill assessments and the gig economy to get a real sense for the best way to go about searching for job and standing out from the rest. Moreover, many people are having to figure out how to transfer their skills to be applicable to new STEM and data-oriented roles.
6. Emotional Intelligence
You might consider tackling subjects such as how to read others’ thoughts and emotions, how to adapt behavior to different situations and how to regulate internal feelings. Emotional intelligence is all-pervasive so you can pretty much find any situation and create a course on emotional intelligence around it.
7. Creativity
Creative thinking helps people to look at problems and situations from different perspectives. It encourages people to develop new, unorthodox solutions to everyday challenges. Creative thinking is becoming more and more important as a skill to learn in college to prepare for “the real world”.
