By Leah Belsky, Coursera Chief Enterprise Officer
The disruption and uncertainty caused by digital transformation, and widespread adoption of hybrid work have created new challenges for organizations. These challenges require leaders to keep pace as change accelerates.
Today, we’re excited to launch the Leadership Academy to help companies develop the next generation of leaders and high-performance teams amid a rapidly changing workplace, remote work, and back-to-office transitions.
Offered as part of the company’s enterprise platform Coursera for Business, the academy will feature content from the world’s top universities and companies — taught by many leading instructors. Coursera’s growing portfolio of Academies includes the Data and Analytics Academy, Cloud and IT Academy, Software Engineering Academy, Marketing Academy, Finance Academy, and now Leadership Academy. Coursera’s six academies are powered by our proprietary and innovative SkillSets platform, which helps employees develop specific skills for specific roles.
The Leadership Academy features 42 SkillSets, including Emotional Intelligence, Interpersonal Skills, Change Management, and Organizational Development. These cutting-edge SkillSets make leadership skills measurable, enabling employees and managers to track progress against skill development targets as learning progresses.
The Leadership Academy prepares employees for a range of different leadership roles by learning to:
- Lead Yourself – enable employees to develop leadership behaviors by obtaining a foundational understanding of management, change, and human skills.
- Lead Teams – develop team leadership capabilities by strengthening change, recognition, people development, and collaboration skills.
- Lead Organizations – build organizational leadership capabilities that empower leaders to grow people and profits.
- Lead Transformation – develop workforce capabilities that empower all employees to adapt, innovate, and transform the business.
The Leadership Academy features over 350 job-based content recommendations from leading university and industry partners including:
- High Performance Collaboration – Leadership, Teamwork, and Negotiation by Professor Leigh Thompson from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern
- Communications Strategies for a Virtual Age by Ivan Wanis Ruiz from the University of Toronto
- How to Manage a Remote Team by Darren Murph and Jessica Reeder from GitLab Inc.
- High Stakes Leadership: Leading in Times of Crisis by Professor Mike Barger from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
Enterprise cloud data management company Informatica is among the first to embrace the Leadership Academy.
“The notion that great leaders are born, not made, is misleading. An important part of leadership development is the realization that there are component skills that can be learned and mastered,” said Matt Dearmon, Director of Leadership and Professional Development at Informatica. “As the world keeps changing, we need to support leaders at every level of our organizations with the types of targeted, reliable skills that form the basis of the Leadership Academy. We’re excited to leverage this Academy to help deliver skills-focused leadership training that is both scalable and personalized to the needs of the learner. We can meet them where they are and help take them where they want to be.”
Starting today, the Leadership Academy will become broadly available to all Coursera for Business customers. With the Leadership Academy, we look forward to helping customers provide teams across their organization with job-based skills development paths, and to equip them with the growth mindset and human skills required to thrive in a digital economy.
For more information about Coursera Academies, visit: www.coursera.org/business/leadership-academy.