Additional Diversity Resources Available to the Campus Community

Learn at work or at home from any computer through Loyola's on-line learning resource, Skillsoft.  Access more than 500 courses in areas such as Diversity, Dealing with Conflict and Confrontation, Time Management, Fast Tracking Your Career, Project Management, Business Communication and Personal Financial Management.  Courses take from 2-4 hours to complete; you can stop mid-course, and pick up where you left off at another time.  You will receive a certificate upon successful completion of each course.

For more information on gaining access to SkillSoft, contact Alyse Falkenhan of Human Resources by email at afalkenhan@loyola.edu or by phone at 410-617-1345.

Here are a few of the diversity courses offered by SkillSoft:

Communication and Diversity Adoption [HR0336]
Companies can recruit and hire employees to create a diverse work force.  Managers can build teams with diversity in mind.  However, organizations can't thrive on diversity if employees don't know how to communicate with each other.  This course emphasizes the influence that communication styles, methods, and strategies have on successfully implementing and maintaining diversity programs.  Successful diversity programs depend on how company employees react to adopting them.  The adoption process begins with how the change to a diverse work force is communicated to key employee segments within a company.  You'll discover how the biases of different employee segments can be used to assist the buy-in to your diversity programs.  You'll also find out what types of communication challenges you might expect.  Key variables for communication based on the five employee segments are addressed. Ultimately, you'll find out how to use both the formal and informal communication networks within your organization to promote and maintain a successful, diverse work force. Duration: 5.0 hours.

Workplace Diversity [HR0331]
What is diversity?  What constitutes a diverse workforce?  The fact is that most workplaces are becoming increasingly diverse as people from different genders, races, cultures, ethnic origins, and lifestyles find themselves working together. Workplace Diversity helps you understand what diversity is all about.  Perhaps your organization is just now encountering the effects of a diverse work force.  Or, maybe your company is trying to overcome the changes wrought by diversity. You'll learn what diversity is and how the demographics of the workforce and the marketplace affect your company and how it does business, both internally and externally. You'll find a growing understanding of how diversity might be valued in your organization.  Finally, you'll discover the impact that diversity may have already had on your company. Duration: 4.0 hours.

Culture and Behavior [HR0332]
This course is aimed at letting you know what has been found out about diversity training so far. Experts don't have all the answers, but they have learned some of the methods and strategies that were successful and some which weren't. You’ll discover some differing cultural norms that you may not even be aware of in your own organization.  You will also learn what diversity audits are, and why and how they are used.  Preliminary strategies for increasing cultural awareness and sensitivity are addressed, such as recognizing the importance of knowing the relationship between cultural dimensions and a person's self-identity.  Finally, methods for dealing with cultural differences offer additional ideas about what works and what doesn't. Duration: 3.0 hours.

Management Skills for the Diverse Work Force [HR0335]
This course offers you information about planning and implementing diversity leadership training for employees at all levels of the company. You'll learn a variety of things, such as recruiting new personnel from alternative pools, planning an orientation program that emphasizes respect for diversity, and discovering what mentoring programs can and cannot do in promoting diversity programs. Finally, you'll receive suggestions for ways to manage specific diversity issues common to many of today’s organizations. Duration: 5.5 hours.

Getting Past Clashes: Valuing Team Diversity [TEAM0213]
As we all know, teams have diverse personalities, skills, and interests that are challenging to put together. It is important that teams can work together to achieve the same goal, even if they don't get along with everyone. By the end of this course, you'll have the skills needed to work with different personality styles including recognizing the importance of getting along with team members who are different from you and the value of contrasting personality types.  You will also learn how to control your gut reactions to difficult people and how to deal with difficult team members. Duration:  2.5 hours.