Communications
360Cornell Certificate Program

When communicating your ideas or significant data through PowerPoint, it is essential that your presentation clearly articulates your points. PowerPoint templates can be visually distracting and obscure valuable insights when used incorrectly. Creating your own template allows you to customize a presentation that specifically targets your audience and embodies visual integrity.

Reading reports are a summary of the most valuable points of your PowerPoint presentation that you can send out to key stakeholders after a presentation or in place of a presentation. Using PowerPoint slides to develop a report allows you to easily manipulate images or content to create a visually appealing summary of your presentation for key decision-makers.

In this course, you will discover the visual design principles and content guidelines necessary to curate a professional PowerPoint presentation or reading report. This will first involve developing your own PowerPoint template using the visual standards that specifically target your audience. You will have the opportunity to develop two supporting PowerPoint slides with appropriate message titles and visual evidence such as charts, graphs, photographs, or artistic elements. You will explore the structural components used in PowerPoint presentations to create a sound structure that guides your audience through your points seamlessly. Finally, you will convert two existing PowerPoint slides into a compelling and professional one-page report.

Students will require access to Microsoft PowerPoint in order to successfully complete this course.

The workplace is filled with employees, clients, and leaders from different backgrounds and cultures. Your Social Style® plays a role in how you communicate and behave in the workplace. This course will prepare you to communicate effectively, efficiently, and empathetically with different cultures no matter your Social Style®.

In this course, you will practice becoming more aware of how your Social Style® is interpreted by others and how that impacts your interactions with others at work. You will also develop strategies for overcoming social blind spots in order to mitigate the risk of ineffective communication in cross-cultural settings. Finally, you will discover the ways you can adapt your Social Style® without compromising your core values for effective communication. By the end of this course, you will have gathered the tools needed to communicate appropriately and effectively in a cross-cultural environment.

Social Style, Social Style Navigator and TRACOM are registered trademarks of the TRACOM Corporation. Social Style Model is a trademark of the TRACOM Corporation. Related content is used with permission from The TRACOM Corporation.

In today's fast-paced professional world, the ability to write clear, compelling messages can truly set you apart. In this course, you will discover how to leverage AI as your writing partner, enhancing both the speed and impact of your communications while maintaining your personal voice.

Guided by Professor Andrew Quagliata, you will explore strategies for crafting precise AI prompts, interpret AI-generated content, and refine your final message so it resonates with your audience. Through real-world exercises — focused on drafting persuasive emails — you'll master time-saving techniques for producing polished, engaging documents that stand out in any setting.

By the end of the program, you'll have gained the confidence and expertise to seamlessly integrate AI into your writing process, elevating the quality of every communication you send.

This course includes a year of free access to the AI Symposium! Symposium features various live, highly participatory virtual Zoom sessions with Cornell faculty and experts to explore today's most pressing topics with your peers. Throughout the year, you may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending a Symposium is not required to successfully complete the certificate program.

A crisis can have a tremendous impact on the people involved and on an organization's performance and reputation, so it's important to communicate effectively in order to minimize negative consequences. Preparing for a crisis through the creation and ongoing analysis of a crisis communication plan can help minimize negative reactions and fallout. In this course, you will define crisis, paracrisis, and the goals of crisis communication. You will share your own experiences and practice identifying potential crises, creating a crisis communication plan, choosing a crisis communication team, and evaluating the plan.

A key component of preparing for a crisis is crafting messages for internal and external stakeholders. Messages must be quick, consistent, and open, and preparing initial statements ahead of time will help leaders and spokespersons communicate effectively during a crisis. You will examine the content of effective initial statements with the opportunity to review real-life examples, evaluating them for quality and success. You will practice addressing difficult questions and criticisms, exploring acceptable and graceful responses.

Once the crisis is over, it's important to review what worked well, what didn't, and to update the crisis communication plan for next time. Reflecting on a real life example, you will evaluate the response to the crisis and the crisis communication plan itself.

If you're in charge of developing and leading strategic organizational change, there are certain tools and concepts you must be familiar with. In this course, the emphasis is on cultivating your ability to assess the need for change. By determining why your organization or team needs change, you'll be able to better answer questions like: What should you change and how should the change be handled? You will explore the political and complex process of introducing change, which includes motivating others, dealing with resistance and the emotional elements of change, and finally, extending change over time and sustaining it. The course is designed to give you practice so you can initiate and carry out a change effort.

Success in business often depends on the ability to influence others and gain their support for your objectives, but it takes more than charisma to win over your leaders or colleagues. Persuasive writing can help you present your case in a way that will secure critical stakeholder support.

This course will help you gain and strengthen your persuasive writing skills. You will be guided through the process of narrowing your objective to a very specific "ask," analyzing your audience to know how to appeal to their sense of reason as well as their emotions, and then building the evidence that you will use to present your case.

You will examine how to create a one-page proposal, step by step, and delve into basic design principles to maximize your writing's impact. Since electronic communication is so predominant in today's business world, you will also discover how to transform your proposal into an email. Through this course, you'll be on your way to becoming a stronger writer and business professional.

From the moment you wake up to the time you go to sleep, you are engaging in impromptu communication that involves presenting ideas that need buy-in from your audience, whether it's seeking an extension on a work assignment or something as seemingly simple as deciding which parent should drive the kids to school. These are typical aspects of everyday life, but the reality is that the better prepared and adaptable you are for these situations, the more impactful you can be in your areas of communication, especially the workplace. You should obviously be rehearsed, but the more effortless and self-assured you come across while speaking, the more convincing you will be. This preparedness will give you the skills and confidence to succeed in various circumstances where effective communication is crucial.

In this course, you will be provided with a foundation in how improving your everyday communication can make your speaking skills more impactful. You will examine how to set up your message while considering its purpose, its context, and its audience. Keep in mind that this is not about speech writing but about crafting an unscripted message. You will then practice these skills in front of real people to test your ability to deliver your message in applicable environments. You'll explore what it's like to adapt that message to different surroundings and challenges. You will also develop emotional intelligence skills as you navigate how to better gauge your audience's reaction. You'll understand how applying these concepts will make your messages resonate, from a routine low-stakes situation to a formal pitch that affects your career goals.

To be an effective leader, you must be able to articulate your thoughts and positions in a clear and concise manner.

Professor Angela Noble-Grange of Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management draws on her own extensive experience as a speaker and communicator to guide students through the preparation and delivery process. She discusses how to identify the communication purpose and analyze your expected audience. She then shares how to formulate and rehearse your message, including how to pay attention to nonverbal communication.

To fine-tune these skills, this course includes interacting with fellow students. Students will participate in discussion forums and will record and share a video of a short presentation that serves as the course project. This provides rich opportunities for students to hone their communication and presentation skills in a practical way, and to learn from the efforts of others.

Mediation is widely used to settle disputes ranging from conflict between neighbors to conflict between nations. Though personal disagreements and international commerce don't share the same substance or consequences, the key procedural elements of the mediation process are the same for both, so workplace conflicts tend to take the same shape regardless of the industry or the size of the conflict.

In this course you will focus on the use of mediation in resolving organizational conflict where the manager or supervisor serves in the role of mediator. Even if you are not a trained mediator, you can draw on proven mediation techniques to help resolve workplace conflict in productive ways. During this course, you will closely examine a workplace scenario and practice properly setting expectations for mediation of that conflict. In each module, new information will be revealed that will ask you to adapt to the various needs of the disputing parties. Additionally, you will practice handling unforeseen emotional outbursts in a productive way and ultimately propose solutions that consider everyone's interests. Through creative work in examining the scenario and reflecting on how the lessons might apply to your own workplace conflicts, you will learn how to expertly prevent inevitable workplace conflicts from escalating.

Have you ever known a very intelligent person who made a very bad decision? If so, you know that having a high IQ does not guarantee that you automatically make critically thoughtful decisions. Critically thoughtful problem-solving is a discipline and a skill—one that allows you to make decisions that are the product of careful thought, and the results of those decisions help your team and organization thrive.

In this course you will practice a disciplined, systematic approach to problem solving that helps ensure that your analysis of a problem is comprehensive, is based on quality, credible evidence, and takes full and fair account of the most probable counterarguments and risks. The result of this technique is a thoroughly defensible assessment of what the problem is, what is causing it, and the most effective plan of action to address it. Finally, you will identify and frame a problem by assessing its context and develop a well-reasoned and implementable solution that addresses the underlying causes.

For people all over the world, in-person interaction has been the medium through which personal and professional communication has traditionally taken place. The COVID-19 pandemic has altered this norm and made it clear that effective virtual communication is a skill that not only business professionals need to master, but also schoolteachers, medical professionals, students — essentially, anyone hoping to make connections within the virtual space.

In this course, you will learn to communicate effectively in a virtual environment and address the complexities inherent in online communication that are largely absent from face-to-face communication. You will learn how to create and adapt to virtual interactions, which includes activities such as setting up your physical space, adjusting your camera, and focusing on intonation and gestures. Finally, you will plan and prepare a high-stakes virtual presentation or communication by putting what you've learned into practice.

All enterprises are governed by numbers; most managers and clients use data every day. Public relations propels those numbers, making PR a business necessity rather than a nice-to-have enhancement. Communications professionals must therefore frame discussions around PR using business metrics developed through evidence-based plans, measurable evaluations, and calculated ROI. Students in this course will examine how "strategic PR" is all about crafting a precise plan to use public relations to achieve organizational goals.

In this course, you will learn that to be successful, you need to map out where your organization is headed in terms of business goals, how PR is going to help you get there, and who your audience is for your PR efforts. You will follow a recommended eight-step plan for building a communications strategy consisting of clearly articulated steps for creating an evidence-based approach to public relations that can help impact your organization's bottom line. By the end of this course, you will be able to devise, measure, and evaluate your PR strategy.

You always need public relations for one critical reason: PR drives sales. But do you have to hire an external PR agency? Can you afford it? How do you choose one? How do you compare requests for proposals from different agencies? And once you've hired an agency, how can you get the greatest value for your spend?

This course is designed to give people who are current or potential clients of external PR firms the skills they need to optimize their PR efforts. In this course, you will identify best practices for determining whether to use external resources, for vetting potential agencies, and for hiring and managing those agencies. As the client, you will always have a finite marketing budget, but you can use best practices to yield the greatest value from the portion of it that you're spending with an agency. You will discover a simple calculation to determine whether you can afford a PR firm now; and if you can't afford one now, you will identify concrete steps you can take towards that goal. Through this course, you will determine how to best leverage a PR agency.

Leaders at every level need to be able to execute on their ideas. In virtually every case, this means that leaders need to be able to persuade others to join in this execution. In order to do so, understanding how to create and utilize power in an organization is critical.

In this course, developed by Professor Glen Dowell, Ph.D., of Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, students will focus on their personal relationship with power as well as how power works in their organization and social network.

Project Management Institute (PMI^®) Continuing Certification: Participants who successfully complete this course will receive 6 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from PMI^®. Please contact PMI ^® for details about professional project management certification or recertification.