About the Communications Skills Company

The Communications Skills Company specializes in conducting onsite training courses in writing, reading, speaking, and listening. We provide the instructor and course material; the customer provides the students and facilities. We also offer one correspondence course: Effective Writing.

Staff

Our courses are conducted by professional trainers with advanced degrees. All regular staff members have taught on the university level; and all staff members have had extensive experience teaching and counseling employees of Government, Business, and Industry. Return to top.

Method

The governing principle in all of our courses is the principle of immediate application. Discussions in technique are followed immediately by sessions in which class members participate actively, and during which they apply the lesson of the day to practice materials based on actual samples of communications problems in Government, Business, and Industry. To make classes more meaningful, instructors give related assignments. These are always collected, reviewed, corrected, and returned. Return to top.

Course Materials and Instructional Aids

We furnish all textual material. This material has been especially developed or carefully selected to meet the needs of the organizations we serve. We also furnish certain instructional aids if necessary. These include videotape systems for oral presentations courses. Return to top.

Schedules

Most of our courses are conducted in 25 hours, but we do offer several shorter courses conducted in 15 hours. We can conduct courses in a variety of formats. However, we believe that the 25-hour courses are most effective if they are conducted in ten 2½-hour sessions over a 2-week period. With this approach, we can conduct two classes daily—the first meeting in the morning, the second in the afternoon. The 15-hour courses are usually conducted in five 3-hour sessions. Return to top.

Standard Formats

Other formats are available upon request. Return to top.

Mixing and Matching Courses

An advantage to format C, by the way, is that you can mix and match our courses. For example, over 2 weeks, you can schedule a Report Writing class in the mornings and an Effective Briefings class in the afternoons. Or you can schedule Secretarial Proficiency in the mornings and Editing and Proofreading Skills in the afternoons. Almost any combination is possible. Return to top.

Special Services

To provide even greater flexibility in meeting your scheduling needs, the Communications Skills Company offers four special services:

  1. Work-study periods.
  2. Consultation sessions.
  3. Customized schedules.
  4. Short courses.

Work-Study Periods: Students are normally assigned homework to complete when they return to their jobs or at home after work. However, if you want your students to complete at least part of their homework assignments in the classroom after the regularly scheduled training period of 2½ hours, then at no extra charge the Communications Skills Company will supervise a work-study period for up to 1 hour after each meeting. (This service is applicable only to those classes that have 2½-hour meetings.)

Work-study periods are useful, for they provide students an opportunity to study away from the interruptions of the office and distractions of the home; and they give the instructor more time to help those individuals who have problems.

When they have completed their assignments, employees return to their jobs. We have you decide whether or not the work-study period will be counted as training time on the employees’ training records, and we will, of course, assist in keeping records for this purpose.

Consultation Sessions: If you want our instructor to give students more individual attention than the work-study periods provide or if you want our instructor to work with your employees in their offices or on the job, we offer consultation sessions. However, we do have to charge an additional fee for this service.

Customized Schedules: If you have special problems with scheduling or want to try a new format, the Communications Skills Company is always ready to help, and usually we can do this at no extra cost. For example, one organization had an especially heavy workload on Monday and Friday; therefore, we conducted classes on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—two 24-hour classes held over 2 weeks with six 4-hour meetings for each class. Another organization wanted three courses over 3 weeks, each class meeting every other day. Many organizations have asked us to change the length of meetings to accommodate a holiday in a schedule. Although, in all of these instances, we were able to customize at no extra cost, we do have to charge more for some types of customizing, especially those which lengthen our stay at one location.

Short Courses: If none of the preceding services solves your scheduling problem, you may want to investigate the possibility of a conducting a short course. If necessary, we can omit certain parts of a course or decrease the number of exercises to convert a 25-hour course, for example, into a 20- or 15-hour course. However, you should keep in mind that shorter courses may decrease the effectiveness of the training and do not necessarily mean a proportionate decrease in cost. Return to top.

Other Considerations

Unlike many other organizations, we offer a complete program in communications skills. Training directors and managers in Government, Business, and Industry agree that this Communications Skills Program offers a number of distinct advantages:

  1. The package makes available a series of related courses in writing, speaking, reading, and listening.
  2. The courses interlock to provide a program continuity that would be difficult to achieve or maintain otherwise.
  3. The courses are flexible. They can and do change to meet the changing demands of Government, Business, and Industry.
  4. The training is clearly job-related and job-oriented. It is not burdened by such non-essentials as impractical theory, peripheral textbook materials, course generalizations, or other lost motions.
  5. No travel costs for employees are involved. We come to your location to conduct the training.

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