The Open University Centre for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) has launched a range of flexible online courses, especially designed for people who wish to extend or update their skills, but who are unable to commit to long-term study. The OU CPD courses can give new skills, knowledge and ideas, which can be applied in the workplace. Most take around 30 hours to complete and can be studied at a time and pace to suit each individual. The discounted course fee is £445 (usually £495), for the members.

Each course, taken from the continually expanding range of online CPD courses draws on the breadth of the Open University's expertise in the work-based professional development offers:

• Relevance to your work
Each course is designed to help you respond to the actual challenges you face in your day-to-day work.

• Immediate applicability
The strong link between a course learning and your work practice means that you can immediately use newly acquired skills and knowledge.

• Online flexibility
The courses are 'chunked' into convenient 1-2 hour elements to enable you to spread your skills development, to keep pace with your work patterns and take in total around 20-30 hours, starting and finishing when it suits you (within a course presentation patterns).

• Online convenience
You can learn online, at work or wherever it is convenient.

• Guidance and feedback
An expert learning adviser will provide you with continuing guidance and feedback.

• Action orientation
By the end of a course you will have built your own Personal Development or Action Plan.

• An Award of Certificate
Each course can enhance your CV with an OU Certificate of successful completion.

The courses currently on offer are:

Effective decision making skills
As managers we make decisions every day.  Many of these are simple and routine, but take up a great deal of our time. Others are more complex, involve taking strategic actions - launching a new product into a new market, investing funds, opening a new business unit. This sort of decisions can carry risks - especially in a climate that is experiencing turbulent changes and great unpredictability.  On this course the students explore how they can reduce the time spent on routine decision making, and how to focus this time on considering more challenging strategic decisions to be faced.

Effective leadership skills
Developing your leadership capabilities can be challenging. There are so many different views about leadership: some theories are popular for a while, and then others seem to take their place. It is hard to know which to put into practice. This course helps you take a critical, but constructive approach to these different ideas and then to identify and take on board the ideas that are of most value to you. It will enable you to take a well-founded approach to developing your own practices and skills in leadership.

How to use coaching at work
Coaching at work is unquestionably one of the most powerful staff development tools. It is work-based, practical and involves learning at work rather than being separate from the job. Coaching is carried out informally in almost every workplace. This course will enable participants to develop more effective coaching skills in their own work setting. Focused on the role of a manager and/or a specialist in coaching staff at all levels, it is suitable for those wanting to develop their own coaching skills and for those who want to encourage coaching skills in the wider workforce.

How well do you communicate? Interpersonal communication at work
Whatever line of work you are in, regardless of your role and responsibilities or a product or a service that you or your organisation provides, communicating with other people will form a major part of your work. As communication is so central to the world of work, it follows that where communication is poor or inadequate, the quality of that work - be it producing that product or offering that service - will suffer as a result. On the other hand, ensuring 'good' and 'effective' communication is a fundamental component of providing high quality services and products. Good, effective communication at work therefore is not a luxury or an optional extra, but essential for success. This course is for those seeking to improve skills in communicating with work colleagues, customers and service users and external stakeholders.

Managing complexity: a toolkit approach
Do you occasionally or, perhaps, regularly have to plan and manage small, but tricky projects?  This course is based on a toolkit, derived after over three years' research working with the public and private sectors in the UK, specifically intended to help managers manage - when alternatives seem to be either to use overly complex project approaches or just to 'muddle along'.  The course is presented in a non-jargon format, taking you step-by-step from an early project outline through to the final project proposal and then to the monitoring and evaluation of the project when it is running. The method applied - Logical Frameworks - has been tried and tested around the world as well as in the UK and has a considerable track record of success.  The approach includes user friendly risk analysis, stakeholder analysis, problem description and project measurement at impact level.

Managing conflict
Conflicts are inevitable - differences, disagreements, disputes or discord between colleagues, with customers or with suppliers happen every day. If badly handled or left unmanaged, they can be costly - reducing organisational performance, decreasing motivation, tying up people's time, or increasing absenteeism. This course will help you recognise the causes and sources of conflict and give you the skills to help you deal with the situation. Whether you are in the front line with customers, coping with suppliers, human resources or colleagues, this course will develop your knowledge and skills base so that you can resolve the conflict more effectively.

For more information on each course and registration please see links below..