Available Course Listings
Baylor endeavors to build upon the strengths of our faculty and staff to develop a culture of excellence. We foster an environment of continuous learning, professional growth, and organizational effectiveness through learning and development opportunities. Professional and leadership development courses and resources are available through the Ignite Learn module.
Log into Ignite at https://www.baylor.edu/ignitelogin and use the Learning Tile to register for available courses.
Recommended Classes by Career Stage
Below is a list of the professional and leadership development courses being offered to Baylor faculty and staff currently. Courses, dates, and times are subject to additions, updates, and changes.
Baylor offers many leadership and professional development workshops and classes for staff and faculty, but it can sometimes be difficult to know where to start or which are most appropriate for different situations.
This graph is meant to simplify things by showing which classes we’d recommend for which career stage and for professional or leadership development focus. Click here to view the suggested breakdown of courses.
These are not hard and fast requirements, but general suggestions on where to get started. For example, Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager presents skills and approaches that would be beneficial to a new professional. However, it’s not suggested as there are other topics that might take initial priority.
In This Guide
- Professional Development Courses
- Leadership Lessons
- Additional Leadership Courses
- Supervising Student Employees
Professional Development Courses
Best Practices for Writing Your Performance Review Self-Evaluation
This course provides an overview of the annual Performance Review process, including the rating scale, and covers best practices for writing an effective self-evaluation.
Dates Offered:
- TBA
A half-day workshop that introduces a simple model and best practices for effective collaboration for any work situation.
Dates Offered:
- August 22, 2025, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Location TBD
- November 19, 2025, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Location TBD
Conflict Management for Managers
Dates Offered:
- TBA
Crucial Conversations for Mastering Dialogue
NOTE: This is an updated version of Crucial Conversations.
Whenever you’re not getting the results you’re looking for, it’s likely a crucial conversation is keeping you stuck. To learn how to deal with high-stakes conversations (where opinions vary and emotions run strong), we invite you to attend our two-day Crucial Conversations Workshop. The Crucial Conversations Workshop can help you approach these situations and more with tact and integrity.
Two-Day Event:
- June 24, 2025, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM, BRIC 1160.02/.03
- June 26, 2025, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM, BRIC 1160.02/.03
Crucial Influence teaches influence and change skills essential for leaders and managers at all levels. This class is based on 50 years of social science research and teaches the personal, social, and structural sources of influence and the supporting strategies to change behavior.
NOTE: This one day class is an updated one-day version of the previous two-day class Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change.
Dates Offered:
- July 17, 2025, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM, BRIC 1160.02/.03
Foundations of Professional Communication
Effective communication is fundamental to long term professional growth and advancement. Would you like to be a better communicator? Learn how to listen better, speak in public better, and write more effective emails?
This half-day workshop covers four fundamental types of communication every professional needs to develop. Together, these form the Foundations of Professional Communication and include non-verbal, verbal, written, and “social" communication.
Explore and learn practical tips to communicate more clearly, write more effectively, speak in meetings impactfully, and actively listen better to others. Plus, we examine relevant practices for navigating communicating in a social media environment.
Dates Offered:
- July 10, 2025, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Hurd Bowlin Conference Room
- December 11, 2025, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Location TBD
Getting Things Done (GTD)
Getting Things Done (GTD) is a program that teaches you how to increase focus on the most meaningful work, organize information, prioritize commitments, create mental space for innovation, and achieve stress-free productivity. It’s productivity with purpose, or in other words—getting more of the right stuff done.
Dates Offered:
- TBA
Leading and Working in the Multigenerational Workplace
For the first time ever, there are five generations working side by side in the workplace. There are both benefits and some challenges leading and working on multi-generational teams. In this class, we’ll define and discuss the events and experiences shaping each generation, move past the stereotypes, and consider how to create and contribute to a thriving multi-generational workplace.
Dates Offered:
- August 6, 2025, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Location TBD
Managing Your Career at Baylor
Managing Your Career at Baylor helps prepare you to take the lead in planning your career. We discuss key topics such as challenges to growing your career, choosing the career strategy that is right for you, matching passion with ability, standing out as an employee, being a better internal candidate, and how to have an ongoing career conversations with your manager. We also cover resume writing and interviewing tips, networking skills, and provide an overview of the University and the different functions of key areas. This is an information-packed, activity-filled course for the professional who is ready to grow their career.
Dates Offered:
- June 12, 2025, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM, Moody 304
- September 5, 2025, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM, Location TBD
The Power of Habit
Based on the bestseller by Charles Duhigg and the latest science in habit formation, The Power of Habit teaches how habits work and how to master them for improved performance.
Dates Offered:
- TBA
Powerful Presenting: Presenting With Confidence
Powerful Presenting covers the essential topics of managing the fear of public speaking, proper preparation for a presentation, and the art of delivering powerful presentations every time. The content is designed to help the novice up to the seasoned presenter who wants to keep getting better. This is an interactive course with class discussions and group activities.
Dates Offered:
- June 6, 2025, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM, Moody 104
Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager
In today's world, many of the people leading projects do not have "Project Manager" in their title or have been trained is project managers. The good news is "unofficial project managers" can build the skills and confidence to lead projects and engage project team members to give their best effort.
This class is aimed at anyone, regardless of their experience in project management, to start, run, and complete successful projects. It provides the tools, skills, and best practices to complete projects on time and on budget.
Dates Offered:
- TBA
This course offers practical guidance on the importance of goals, how to set SMART goals, and ongoing goal management.
Dates Offered:
- June 4, 2025, 10:00 AM - 11:00 PM, via Teams
- June 11, 2025, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, via Teams
- July 15, 2025, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, via Teams
Are you considering a leadership position? Do you feel you are ready to make the leap to management? Step Up: Prepare to Lead introduces future leaders/managers to important leadership concepts, explores critical topics new leader/managers need to know, and highlights distinctives of Christian leadership.
- August 7, 2025, 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Foster 122
Leadership Lessons
These are short classes, usually less than two hours, focused on leadership skills and best practices.
Leadership Lessons: Communicating as a Leader
This short class looks at the additional communication demands leaders face, how to be intentional about communication, and ways leaders can communicate even more effectively.
Dates Offered:
- April 23, 2025, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM, via TEAMS
Leadership Lessons: Creating a Feedback Culture
As a leader, you know giving and receiving feedback is crucial to your team’s performance. Ongoing, informal feedback is how people know what they are doing well, where they are off track, and what they could be doing even better. But feedback isn’t just something provided by leaders. The best teams are focused on continually improving through a culture where everyone on the team is comfortable seeking and giving feedback to their peers and even their leaders.
This short course provides participants with a simple feedback model, how to approach feedback when things aren’t simple, how to seek and receive feedback well, and how to build a feedback culture with your team.
Dates Offered:
- July 15, 2025, 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM, via Teams
Leadership Lessons: Handling Common Employee Relations Issues
This course analyzes the 5 most common employee relations issues managers face today and provides HR best practices to mitigate risk and provide conflict resolution strategies. Managers will learn ways of navigating performance and behavior issue conversations and documenting disciplinary actions using Baylor’s progressive disciplinary process as outlined in BU-PP 807 Staff Disciplinary Actions.
Dates Offered:
- TBA
Leadership Lessons: Leadership Presence
This 90-minute class looks at the impact leaders can and do have on others and focuses on being intentional about how leaders show up and lead and influence in all directions, even upward.
Dates Offered:
- TBA
Leadership Lessons: Leading Great Meetings
This course covers best practices for leading effective, productive, and even enjoyable meetings. Includes the different types of meetings (and when to use each) as well as leading in person, remote, and hybrid meetings.
Dates Offered:
- TBA
Leadership Lessons: Making Your One-on-Ones Matter
One on one (1:1) meetings are arguably a leader’s most valuable meetings. However, not every leader holds them and not every leader holds them well. This short class will help you create impactful 1:1 meetings that make a difference. You will learn the value and benefits of 1:1s, how to get started, three different types of 1:1s, how to help your employees get the most from the meeting, and how to avoid common mistakes.
Dates Offered:
- August 7, 2025, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM, via Teams
Leadership Lessons: Mistakes Managers Make
No manager intends to fail, but there are some common mistakes that cause managers get in their own way. This class discusses common leadership errors and ways managers can avoid them.
Dates Offered:
- TBA
Leadership Lessons: Retaining Great Employees
This class looks at some of the challenges to retaining great employees and looks at several the possible solutions.
Dates Offered:
- June 10, 2025, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM, via Teams
- August 13, 2025, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM, via Teams
Leadership Lessons: Writing and Discussing Staff Performance Evaluations
This short class provides managers with approaches and best practices for writing and delivering annual staff performance appraisals.
Dates Offered:
- TBA
Additional Leadership Courses
Leadership Essentials: Managing at Baylor
The transition to supervisor is one of the most difficult career transitions because leading others requires developing an all-new skill set and shifting one's focus to setting expectations, motivating, resolving conflicts, holding others accountable, and getting work done through others.
This class isn’t a deep dive into leadership theory. Rather, it is the practical knowledge and supervisory skills leaders need right away. The three main topics covered are:
- The fundamentals of supervision, including tools and best practices.
- Employment laws and legal guidelines all leaders need to know.
- The most important things to know about being a leader at Baylor.
Dates Offered:
- July 10, 2025, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM, BRIC 1160.02/.03
Merit for Managers
This virtual learning session is targeted towards new managers of staff or managers who would like an annual refresher on the annual Staff Merit process. We will review the Staff Merit process within Ignite and will walk through the timeline, what information you will be reviewing and what actions you must take to complete the merit process.
Dates Offered:
- Click here to view past April 22, 2024 recorded session.
The 4 Essential Roles of Leadership
This two-day class is designed to equip leaders to Inspire Trust, Create Vision, Execute Strategy, and Coach Potential to help your team achieve its most important results. This is an in-depth class focusing on helping you build a high trust culture, create a shared team vision and strategy, identify and take consistent action on the most important goals, and coach people to reinforce performance and reach their full potential.
Dates Offered:
Two-Day Event:
- Day 1: May 14, 8:30am-5:00pm, BRIC 3160
- Day 2: May 21, 8:30am-5:00pm, BRIC 1160.02/.03
- Day 1: July 23, 2025, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM, Moody 304
- Day 2: July 24, 2025, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM, Moody 304
Supervising Student Employees
If it's your first time hiring a student employee, or first time in a while, sign up for this step-by-step session with the Student Employment Team. This workshop includes a review of the entire lifecycle of student employees, including all the details you need to onboard, rehire, and separate student employees.
Dates Offered:
- June 10: 3:00-4:00pm, via Teams
Other Professional Development Resources
LinkedIn Learning
Over 21,000 courses and learning resources covering a wide range of technical, business, software, and creative topics. Sign up at: https://helpdeskplus.web.baylor.edu/linkedin-learning
RightNow Media @ Work
Over 20,000 videos and resources on professional development topics such as leadership, communication, teams, and dealing with change. Also includes resources on marriage, parenting, finances, and mental health, as well as resources for children and teens. Sign up at: https://app.rightnowmedia.org/join/BaylorUHumanResources
Last Updated: May 15, 2025
