Hello everyone,

It has been some time since I last posted this information. Below is a list of free self study modules and assessment instruments that can be downloaded from my website. I apologize for the length of this post but wanted to inclde all of the free information.

ASSESSMENT INSTRUMENTS

Leadership Development Needs Analysis (22 Pages)
A paper-and-pencil 360-degree tool for assessing leadership development needs. Unlike some other 360 degree instruments, your identity will remain totally anonymous – you will not be asked for any personal information, including whether or not you are a superior, subordinate, or peer. The authors of this tool believe that anonymity facilitates honest, objective, and user-friendly feedback.
Instructor Development Needs Analysis (15 Pages)
The purpose of this tool is to assist businesses, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and educational institutions in identifying the development needs of their instructional staffs.

Management Training Development Needs Analysis (8 Pages)
The primary purpose of the MTDNA is to identify management training and development needs in your organization.

Staff Training Needs Analysis (10 Pages) The primary purpose of the STDNA is to identify staff training and development needs in your organization.


Training and Educational Leader Self Assessment (TELSA) (40 Pages)
The purpose of TELSA is to provide you, our training and educational leaders, with a tool for assessing your development needs. We believe that you will find TELSA to be a useful tool if you hold or are a candidate for any of the following leadership positions:

Academic Dean
Academic Department Chair
Human Resources Development Manager
Organizational Development Manager
Organizational Learning Manager
School Principal
Training Manager/Director
Training or Educational Team Leader
Why assess the needs of training and educational leaders? The answer is simple: in our rush to address the development needs of our learners, trainers, teachers, and professors, we frequently forget to address our own development needs.

Training Program Self-Assessment Tool (24 Pages)
Welcome to TrainSAT, the Training Program Self-Assessment Tool. The primary purpose of this tool is to provide training organization personnel with a systematic method for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their training programs. TrainSAT also provides guidance on addressing program weaknesses.

Web User Training Needs Assessment (8 pages)
In researching usage of the World Wide Web (WWW) for work-related purposes, the author of WUTNA discovered that many employees did not know how to perform a substantial number of basic tasks, or performed them with difficulty. The purpose of WUTNA is to provide businesses, consultants, educational institutions, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and citizens with a systematic means of identifying and prioritizing the training needs of their web users.

Measuring Your Organization's Performance Management (3 pages)
This paper pencil instrument, which provides you with a "snap-shot" of your organization's performance, was developed by Margie E. Fry and Elaine C. Wood, and is used permission from the author’s.

SELF STUDY PROGRAMS

Identifying Your Management Style (41 Pages)

As a supervisor or manager, you interact with many people while doing your job. If all of them were exactly alike, this module wouldn't be important. But the people you encounter at work aren't exactly the same. They each have their own predominant patterns of behavior. These patterns of behavior are sometimes referred to as "styles."
To be effective as a supervisor or manager, you must work effectively with a variety of people. That's what this module is about - making choices to effectively deal with situations and people in the workplace. We hope you'll use the information in this module. If you do, we're confident you'll enhance your ability to supervise/manage different types of employees and deal with a variety of situations.

Effective Employee Relations (45 Pages)

As a supervisor or manager, you have a significant impact on employee relations. Your actions affect employee morale, turnover, and productivity. This module is designed to give you information useful for managing the employee relations climate in your area of responsibility. Refer to it whenever you foresee especially challenging employee relations situations.

Identifying Your Strengths and Weaknesses (21 Pages)

Organizational self-assessment is only one factor in the improvement equation. Study after study shows that effective managers and supervisors continually assess and seek to improve their own knowledge, skills, and behavior.

This module is about personal self-assessment; organizational self-assessment is covered in another module. This module is designed to help you:

• Identify and act upon your strengths and weaknesses

• Recognize your impact on others

• Evaluate your standards and ethics

• Handle stress and prevent burnout

Introduction to Leadership (20 Pages)

Leadership is an ageless topic that has been studied from many different viewpoints. In this module, when we use the term "leadership," we are referring to the process of helping to direct and mobilize people and/or their ideas to achieve a shared vision. The elements produced by leadership are movement and change. Throughout the ages, individuals seen as leaders have produced movement and change, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. They have done so in a variety of ways, though their actions always seem to boil down to establishing where a group of people should go, getting the group lined up in that direction and committed to movement, and then energizing the group to overcome the inevitable obstacles it will encounter along the way.

Introduction to Management (32 Pages)


Accepting responsibility
Delegating work
Defining job functions
Promoting ownership
Most of us have room for improvement in our performance of one or more of these duties. Use this as an opportunity to hone your skills and make optimal use of your responsibility and authority.

Problem Solving & Decision-Making (39 Pages)

As a manager or supervisor, your workdays are filled with challenging problems and decisions. Some of the best practices for efficiently solving problems and arriving at good decisions are distilled within these pages. Though we may be armed with the best practices for either challenge – problem solving or decision-making – occasionally we reap unacceptable results.

Continuously improving your problem-solving and decision-making skills produces the best possible results – with the available information and within a finite schedule. Good solutions and decisions are the sum of an equation that includes data plus time available to take action plus results.

Wise managers and supervisors recognize that seeking perfection invites organizational gridlock. The purpose for this module is to help you increase the skills you already have to think straight, stay out of gridlock, and use logical processes for problem solving and decision making within your group and throughout the organization.

Effective Communication Techniques (49 pages)

Communication and organizational success are directly related. Good communication can have a positive and mobilizing effect on employees. Poor communication can produce powerful negative consequences, such as the following:

1. Distortion of goals and objectives of the organization.

Through anxiety, distrust, lack of support, rigidity, and other human resource issues created by poor communication, employees develop patterns of work in which they set their own agenda without regard for the organization's mission. They focus on tasks that are only partially related to the major goals of the organization. For example, employees may devote their work efforts to pet projects instead of working to accomplish organizational objectives.

2. Misuse of resources.

Another consequence of poor communication is the misuse of an organization's resources. For instance, money may be budgeted for purchases that are only marginally effective, and employees may be assigned tasks that do not take full advantage of their abilities. Because of mistrust, a highly competent employee may be given routine duties and never be allowed to make significant decisions and to advance in the organization.

Simply follow this link, answer a few questions and you will be able to download the materials:

http://www.trainersdirect.com/...er/Questionnaire.htm

Bob Blake
TrainersDirect
www.trainersdirect.com