Coursera announces launch of Leadership Academy to develop next generation teams
Coursera, announced the launch of its new 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. The academies are powered by recent innovations such as SkillSets, which help employees develop specific skills for specific roles. The Leadership Academy features 42 SkillSets, including emotional intelligence, interpersonal skills, change management, and organisational development.
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 Organisations – build organisational 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 a leading university and industry partners including:
- Information Visualisation: Applied Perception by Enrico Bertini and Cristian Felix from New York University
- Foundations: Data, Data Everywhere from Google
- Managing the Company of the Future by Julian Birkinshaw from University of London and London Business School
- Developing An Entrepreneurial Mindset: First Step Towards Success by Forrest S. Carter, Ken Szymusiak and David Wheeler from Michigan State University
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 realisation that there are component skills that can be learned and mastered,” said Matt Dearmon, Director of Leadership and Professional Development at Informatica.
He added, “As the world keeps changing, we need to support leaders at every level of our organisations 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 personalised to the needs of the learner. We can meet them where they are and help take them where they want to be.”
Initally, the Leadership Academy will become broadly available to all Coursera for Business customers. Coursera for business provides more than 2,000 companies worldwide with role-based skills development, including hands-on learning, measurement, benchmarking, and analytics.
“The United Arab Emirates is a regional business hub. Strong leadership is fundamental to its vision. The country ranks #1 in the MENA region and #2 globally in overall business skills, according to our latest global skills report,” said Anthony Tattersall, Vice-President of Europe, Middle East and Africa at Coursera.
He added, “We are excited to launch the Leadership Academy, which will further support United Arab Emirates businesses in identifying leadership roles, assessing current gaps, and developing this talent pool of leaders with world-class content and learning.”
