Top skills and courses

6 Courses That Highlight the Unique Strengths of Women Leaders

March 8th is International Women’s Day – a day to celebrate women and push for a more gender-balanced world, with the theme this year being #BalanceforBetter.

For the workplace, balance certainly matters: organizations that have gender balanced leadership teams outperform those with unbalanced teams. And yet, while there has been progress in the past 40 years, there’s still a long way to go. For proof, look no further than the World Economic Forum’s finding that shows if the same pace of gender progress continues, true gender equality in the workplace won’t exist for 217 years.

The vision at LinkedIn is to create economy opportunity for every member of the global workforce, women included. And that means helping to provide women with a path to leadership positions disproportionately held by men.

So, we’ve just released a new course, Leadership Strategies for Women, taught by professors at two of the top business schools in the country. The course shares advice on how women can leverage their unique strengths to become leaders, while giving practical advice on things like how to overcome imposter syndrome and get actionable feedback as a female leader.

Additionally, we’ve pulled a list of courses that women in leadership watch at a disproportionate rate. These skills are relevant to any leader – like how to manage with empathy, while managing up at the same time.

The most uniquely popular* courses among female leaders on LinkedIn Learning are:

  1. Leading With Emotional Intelligence
  2. Having Difficult Conversations
  3. Negotiating Your Job Offer
  4. Transitioning From Manager to Leader
  5. Managing Your Manager

For true change to happen, organizations need to recruit more inclusively and do their best to remove unconscious biases from their workforce. But, in the spirit of #BalanceforBetter, it’s equally important for women to master the skills needed to be transformational leaders – and these six courses are a great place to start.

*Uniquely popular courses are those watched by this group at a higher rate than the average professional on LinkedIn Learning. Female leaders are defined as women with positions of director-level and above.

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