Secretarial English and frontline telephone skills

• Dealing with business correspondence.
• Making, receiving and handling complaints.
• Telephone language.
• Message taking.
• Effective ways of starting and ending calls.
• Problem-solving.

Report and proposal writing skills

• Grammar of report writing.
• Intention, style, tone and register.
• Appropriacy: Formal versus informal language.
• Audience awareness.
• Summarising information and using bullet points.
• Editing, proof reading and redrafting.

Meetings and negotiation skills

• The dos and don’ts of meetings.
• Starting, managing and ending meetings.
• The structures of decision making.
• Expressing and asking for opinions.
• Language of agreement and disagreement.
• Polite interruptions.

Conflict handling and negotiation skills

• Diplomatic language for handling conflict and good negotiations.
• Interacting effectively with others.
  The language of persuasion.
• Softening techniques.
• Presentation skills.
• The importance of tone.

Pronunciation and speaking skills

• Sound awareness.
• Word and sentence stress.
• Effective intonation.
• Voice speed and pitch.
• Connected speech.
• Commonly mispronounced words.

Advanced business correspondence skills

• The style and register of written business English.
• Writing faxes, emails and memos.
• Formal and informal letter writing.
• Report and proposal writing.
• Writing in plain English.
• Business vocabulary and grammar.

Presentation skills

• Planning a presentation.
• The purpose of a presentation.
• Holding the audience’s attention.
• The body of the presentation.
• Ending the presentation effectively.
• Inviting and handling discussions and questions.

Minute taking in meetings

• Planning and preparing communications of meetings.
• Objectives of an agenda.
• Types and rules of agendas.
• Valid meeting procedures.
• Types of minutes.
• Taking minutes.

Time Management

• How to take advantage of time and achieve more.
• Systematically planning for an outcome.
• How to deal with interruptions and stay in control.
• Organising daily activities to be more productive.
• How to stop procrastinating.
• Becoming more goal orientated and productive.