Sometimes here at Professional and Continuing Education (PACE) we get a course that’s so interesting and innovative that we can’t resist taking it ourselves. Such was the case with our recent Developing Emotionally Intelligent Communication Skills course. 

Daniel Powers, the instructor for the course, developed an innovative design and approach for this online course. Due to the new approach, his name got around the office before the course even launched and we all ended up taking the course together as a team. This ended up being a great experience as we got to know more about one another and how each of us work.

Emotional intelligence seems to be everywhere these days. Fast Company has an article talking about emotional intelligence almost every week, Elon Musk’s emotional intelligence has been cited as one of his greatest strengths, and Forbes even talked about emotional intelligence as it applies to Game of Thrones.

For us here at PACE, though, the course was even more than a chance to develop our individual emotional intelligence and evaluate how we communicate with others. It was an intimate team-building exercise that let us learn key elements about one another’s personalities and how we all work together. 

“Our excitement about the course fueled office conversations,” says Instructional Designer, Tamara Mitchell. “On more than one occasion I was able to use strategies from the course to understand the best approach for communicating internally with our team and externally with our clients.”

Identifying our communication styles would be valuable on its own. Since we all took the course together, however, we also learned how each of us operate and were able to better communicate because of that.

Some people on our team found this experience so valuable that they wanted to continue in the Learning to Lead Certificate. Meddie Sims, Enrollment Specialist, says she was “worried about keeping up” at first since she “hadn’t taken online training before.” After her experience, though, she’s signed up for the next course in the series to take her education even further!

Those of us who aren’t continuing in the series still got a lot out of this one course and the training it gave. For me, I know more about how I operate and communicate in the workplace and the world. As a relatively new employee at PACE, I’m also excited to know how others work as I become part of a new team.