Making Verbal Connections

About the Badge

Virtually all careers involve dealing with people, whether you’re in contact-heavy professions like sales, more solitary fields like research and development, or any of the myriad positions between.

If you’re like most job seekers in today’s employment marketplace, your education and training outfitted you with the hard skills and technical expertise needed to do your job—but left you fending for yourself when it comes to navigating the bewildering waters of interpersonal communication.

Yet for all of us, the quality of our communication with coworkers, managers, and customers can truly make or break our careers—not to mention determining our job satisfaction and chances for promotion. All the technical expertise in the world won’t help when we don’t know how to establish rapport, make ourselves understood, persuasively convey our ideas, navigate and resolve conflict, and listen to and understand what those around us are really saying.

Students who take our Making Verbal Connections badge learn to do just that.

• In our Powerful Presentations course, you will master the art of presenting with confidence and effectiveness through establishing rapport, telling stories, and more.
• In our Two-Way Communication course, you will become a better listener, learning how to communicate with various personalities and fix communication problems in the workplace.
• In our Influencing Your Audience course, you will learn from famous historical speeches how to persuade others with logic, emotion, and confident presentation.

Preview one of our courses on communication from the 2020 mini-course session taught by Dr. Gabriel Schenk:

Time and Equipment Requirements

Each of the three courses that comprise the Making Verbal Connections badge is 4 weeks long. That means you can complete the entire badge in only 12 weeks! Each week during a course, you will have two 1-hour sessions of live instruction, and then 1-2 hours of homework.

That means a total time commitment of no more than 12-16 hours per course. This length of time allows students to fully explore the course topic and develop strong foundational skills without having to commit to a lengthy training program. 

Plus, you won’t need any fancy equipment to participate. As long as you have a computer and an Internet connection, you can be a Signum Path student.

Our program uses GoToWebinar conferencing software for live class sessions. Through the GTW interface, you can ask questions and submit comments to your instructor. The instructor can also allow audio for individual comments or group discussions, depending on the needs of the course. Video sharing is also available for demonstrations, presenting assignments, and other interactive elements.

The courses in the Making Verbal Connections badge will also use a Google Classroom that you will access through a Signum-provided email address. In that classroom space, you can view and submit assignments, check the course schedule, and discuss ideas with your instructor and fellow participants.