Essential Business Skills opens doors to challenging but rewarding choices for opportunities in businesses of all sizes, to gain a mid-level management position. It gives you the opportunity to choose your career path from a rather broad range before you specialize on a focused role in corporations or if you want to consider entrepreneurship. Our training helps you to define what role you may want to specialize in, such as to become a project manager. We recommend that this should be the first orientation to other business courses to help provide the context to fit those other skills and knowledge areas into a bigger picture.

Essential Business Skills is only part of a more complete business management education – yet it is a critical part in terms of being capable of working in a supervisory role. We recommend you have your own computer to work on, so that you can benefit from the Excel™-based tools we have created to illustrate theory with practical and useful applications.

Many people are intimidated by accounting, or they try to avoid spending any more time than necessary in the company of financial statements. Reality is that success in business is dependent on your ability to comfortably relate to financial information that reflects the lifeblood of a company. If you run your own business you must know exactly what the status is of your financial health in order for the business to survive and flourish. If you set your sights on a corporate career, then with additional responsibilities most promotions will make it increasingly important that you are well versed in accounting and finance.

You need a solid foundation in financial accounting to understand how, what, and where business transactions are recorded in an accounting system. The context for this course is of a small- to medium-business both to illustrate the concepts and to provide examples that are more comprehensive for an understanding of what is involved in managing financial information.

To understand the bigger picture of business we must understand the economic environment that a business operates within. We now live in a global economy that influences what decisions can be made domestically or at an individual business level. The subject intimidates some people, but (like many other things) you will still be affected by economics whether you try to grasp the concepts or try to ignore it. In this course we present a wide range of topics that provide a good foundation for understanding how economics affects business. The importance of economics is that it helps chart the potential impact of business- or political choices, and how managers must act to minimize the negative effect of some of these choices and to profit from positive actions that might open up new opportunities.

The Goals and Functions of Financial Management are critical to a firm’s success, and we rely heavily on a good understanding of economics and accounting to explain the concepts of finance. The overriding goals of financial management are shareholders’ wealth maximization and return on investment, which often translated into rewarding Executive Salaries for delivering wealth maximization. The scope is affected by the forms of organization – sole proprietorship, partnership, or corporation. Tools for accomplishing these goals involve the Pricing Mechanism of Financial Markets: Allocation of capital, Reliance on debt, Interest rates, and the major Internationalization of financial markets discussed in Economics.

Reaching far beyond hiring, paying, and training employees, we will explore an integrated set of HRM processes, programs, and systems within an organization that are focused on the effective deployment and development of employees. The employees include contract workers, external project members, or other similar individuals working for the company under a new workplace paradigm that is more fluid and flexible than even 20 years ago. Human resources are a broad range of contributors to business operations: they need to be managed like any other resources like cash, materials, machines, and so on. Legal aspects of Human Resources Management are becoming increasingly complex and are of critical importance to all levels of management, including project management.

The aim of this course is to help students to develop the knowledge of law needed in business and gain understanding to interpret business situations and how specific cases would likely be interpreted based on business law. The emphasis of this study is on what can be achieved – not what minimum skills are required for an entry level job, but how to establish a career in business.

Business transactions require an understanding of the legal environment to ensure a proper foundation for the manner in which business is conducted, from compliance with rules and regulations, to collections and dealing with evidence to support your ability to collect. The objective of this training is to establish a point of reference with “generic tools and techniques” that help you to adapt to (or adopt) tools and procedures used in a workplace or to embrace any changes that occur within that workplace over time to make sure that they have a solid legal foundation. This can be extremely important for project managers that often deal with conflict.

In this course we focus on how to write more formal business correspondence that avoids the trite and stiff expressions that can be worse than grammar or spelling mistakes to sink your credibility. Understand how to express facts and recommendations in concise, easy to understand, paragraphs to make your messages more effective in eliciting the desired responses and/or actions in a business context. Communications skills are critical – it does not matter much what you already know if you do not have the ability to express yourself so that people can discover how much you already know. Written communications are especially important to make that all important great first impression.

One of the interesting areas of confusion in business is that people tend to think of marketing as selling: then they immediately back off from the subject because they do not see themselves as salespeople. Truth is, marketing is the strategic side of how to determine if there is a demand for specific products or services in order to develop the concepts and thus create something to sell in the future. The course has a specific theme to explain marketing essentials: it also offers opportunity to discuss and analyze specific applications to put a practical spin on theory.

To make projects more exciting and not specific to project management, the intent is to allow individuals to propose their own project, something that they are hoping to achieve in their future: a landscaping business, a horse riding and stables business, a cleaning business, and so on. It is also an option to think about a type of business that the student wants to work for, so they have an opportunity to prepare a compelling case for an employment arrangement. This makes the course a little more challenging to teach, but it also helps to keep the course fresh and relevant.

The capstone of the business program is completing a business plan – this can be an imaginary business or ideally a business you would like to start if you could find the startup capital. In this course you will draw on all the business knowledge you have gained that you then put at work to establish a business (or find if you can afford to start a business). This is designed from an entrepreneurial paradigm and it includes the tools you need to thoroughly investigate a business opportunity and to seek funding if required.

Of course, you are not required to start a business to successfully complete this course – you simply put in the effort to learn from experience while you apply theory you have learned earlier in the program. The scope of this course is to teach the basics of creating a new business venture starting with the planning process in order to obtain financing and/or investment capital. We examine the process of analyzing every aspect of a business proposal with strategies to minimize risks inherent in any new business venture