Quality Courses

Recently I took some courses. They had an unusual format, I really liked it. All theory was homework, group lessons were practice. There were 5 topics, for each topic there were 4 lessons once a week. Each lesson is an hour long.

• Monday - negotiation practice.
• Tuesday - practice for team leads.
• Wednesday - practice for CEO.
• Thursday - practice for project managers.
• Friday - practice for CTO.

Essentially, these were 5 free samples of full-fledged courses, which are delivered separately and for several months. Landing of the courses were made for aliens, so expectations were low. Nevertheless, as a result, I learned a lot of new things. Considering that a full course for a CEO costs 2500$, it was nice to receive a portion of the content for free. Also, there was adequate time for training, this is important for busy engineers.

The negotiation practice involved real-life situations. Those in which a manager with no experience would think “we need to fire them or quit ourselves.” The cheat code, perfected to the point of automaticity, in the form of the book “Difficult Conversations” was very useful. By the way, Difficult Conversations is the only paper book I have purchased in the last 6 years. I keep this book at home only to give to a guest someday. The guest just needs to mention that he wants to learn how to negotiate intelligently, and not haphazardly.

Team leads practice had content similar to negotiations, but you need to resolve the situation on the scale of the team, and not one person. Overall I liked it too. I especially liked seeing how some people think outside the box. It was also interesting to see how people think by default.

PM practice had very high-quality content on building processes for project managers. I haven’t seen this anywhere else on the Internet. A breath of fresh air after tons of cargo cult content on this topic.

The most interesting thing, of course, was the practice for the CEO and CTO. There was a lot there that broke the pattern. More about this in the following articles.