14 classes in NYC that could help you get a promotion

Regardless of current professional status, it is likely that learning Excel will help open doors for you. The program is the most commonly used computer application in white collar professions and non-office workers benefit from knowing how to keep their information streamlined and organized using this spreadsheet tool. In this Excel bootcamp, you’ll learn the basics of creating different kinds of columns, filtering and searching sheets and creating automated functions that take care of simple math for you. Then, you’ll learn more advanced, business focused Excel skills, including how to work with large datasets and how to use PivotTables to compare multiple, contingent bits of data at the same time. No matter what your career goals, it is very likely that learning Excel will help you meet them.

Even if you don’t work in a creative industry, learning your way around Adobe Photoshop will certainly come in handy. This class covers all the basics, including cropping, masking, layering and understanding file formats and resolution. By the end of this course, you’ll know how to utilize all of the advanced features of the program and you’ll have gotten a great deal of hands-on experience creating your own Photoshop projects. You can even take those projects and add them to your personal portfolio to demonstrate to your employers that you are deserving of that promotion.  Never send out a grainy photo or pixelated logo again!

Learning how to manage data and utilize LLMs and machine learning algorithms is a vital component of succeeding in the modern business landscape. In this Python bootcamp, you’ll learn how the programming language can be used to help you organize, query, analyze and visualize different datasets and databases. Learning Python is relatively accessible for new programmers and the language offers students the opportunity to start working with increasingly complex data science processes. By the end of the course, you’ll be prepared to start working with machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms that are poised to significantly disrupt a wide range of industries. If you want to stay on the cutting edge of business technology, learning how to use this new data technology will be essential

With both group classes and private lessons in 20 different languages, ABC Languages has something for everyone. Sign up for lessons in Arabic, Mandarin, French, Spanish or any other language to gain a new skill to add to your resume. This school’s roster of clients includes the College Board and the FBI, so you know they have to be pretty good. 

If you are working with data, learning Excel is only the first step you should take to ensure that you can move up the corporate ladder. However, if you really want to take your data wrangling skills to the next level, you should consider enrolling in this SQL bootcamp. Standard Querying Language is one of the most important languages for database management and in this program, you’ll learn how to write algorithms and code for querying large data sets in complex and conditional ways. This will help you work with large datasets in faster and more efficient ways and will set you up for long-term success in any data-related field.

It doesn’t matter what kind of career you are pursuing, it is likely that you’ll need to do far more writing than you have anticipated. It may be as simple as needing to write emails to prospective clients or as complex as writing reports on the progress that individuals and teams are making to various stakeholders. In any case, you want to be sure that your writing is crisp, clean and deliberate. This bootcamp will give you a crash course in important grammar rules, tips for avoiding common writing mistakes and strategies for writing persuasive and rhetorically compelling emails, memos, reports and other common business-related texts. Set yourself apart from the competition by mastering the art of clean, crisp business writing and set yourself up for earning promotions based on your ability to cleanly communicate with co-workers, clients and subordinates.

Sometimes, the best way to demonstrate that you have the skills you need to earn a promotion is to get official certification in a tool or skill that you imagine you’ll need to warrant getting that promotion. If you work with any of the major tools in the Adobe Creative Cloud (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere Pro or After Effects), you can attend one of these certification courses and learn the skills you need to pass the official Adobe certification exam while learning vital career skills for anyone working in a creative industry. You’ll receive hands-on training, private tutoring to prepare for the 90-minute proficiency exam and, as part of your tuition, you will receive the chance to take the exam twice, giving you multiple chances to earn your certification. If you plan to work with any of these applications at a professional level, these courses will provide the training and accreditation you need.

In the business world, it doesn’t matter what kind of work you are doing, you want to have a memorable and evocative website. Learning how to program web pages is a useful skill to have and will make you significantly more valuable to your company. In this course, students will learn how to build the aspects of a web application that a user directly interacts with (called the front end), including elements like buttons, links, graphics and storefronts. This is primarily done using HTML/CSS and JavaScript and students with no coding experience can learn how to write the code that powers these elements of the web application. By the end of this course, you’ll have a practical understanding of the process of building a professional web application and you’ll have a portfolio of designs that you can show to prospective employers.

Few businesses can thrive without a healthy marketing campaign and social media marketing has become a major component of most online advertising strategies. If you want to expand the scope of your marketing skills or demonstrate that you can help grow a company, learning your way around these platforms in a social media marketing certificate program is one way to accomplish these goals. In this program, you’ll learn the unique affordances of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Linkedin and Twitter and you’ll learn how to tailor your advertising strategy to those platforms. You’ll also get hands-on experience working with the tools that platforms provide for advertisers to make the process of building and running a campaign more efficient. By the end of this course, you’ll be ready to take the reins of a social media marketing campaign and demonstrate your worth to your company.

Not all of the skills you’ll need to demonstrate your worth for a promotion are technical skills. Learning soft skills, like lateral thinking, communication and collaboration are vital to helping you become a well-rounded employee. One place to practice these skills (and have a good time) is in an improv class, especially one designed specifically with business professionals in mind. In a class like this, you’ll play simple improv games designed to help you become better at thinking on your feet, collaborating with team members and thinking outside the box as you attempt to help build a scene from nothing. Or, you might learn to better express yourself in a scene study during an acting course. These lessons might not have the most obvious benefit to business professionals, but once you start feeling more comfortable sharing your ideas in meetings and bouncing thoughts off of your coworkers, you’ll be glad you took this course.

While technical skills are vital to a business’s success, it is also essential that someone can manage the human resources that go into completed complex projects. In this course, you’ll learn how to oversee employees, keep projects on track and ensure that time and resources are spent correctly to ensure that a product is delivered on time and under budget. This course covers basic strategies of management and gives students the opportunity to discover what strategies they think will work before for them. If you want to increase your lifetime earning potential and go from team member to team leader, this kind of training is going to be essential.

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of knowing how to leverage data if you want to score a promotion, but knowing how to analyze data isn’t useful if you can’t communicate your findings to stakeholders. Enter Tableau, one of the most popular data visualization applications on the market. Tableau allows users to easily create interactive dashboards that can be used to create dynamic data visualization tools, allowing users to simply change a few sliders or press a few buttons and instantly query data and translate it into graphs, maps and charts. Since it is interactive, you can also make changes on the fly to answer questions or demonstrate other findings without needing to create new visualizations. If you need to communicate data findings to others, learning Tableau will make it far easier and make your work far more valuable to your company.

While technical training is important, there are a lot of jobs where knowing your way around a database or a code compiler won’t cut it without the soft skills needed to work as part of a team. One skill that people constantly express difficulty with is public speaking, since it can be intimidating to go in front of a crowd and deliver or defend your ideas. One way to get practice speaking in public and learn strategy for everything from stress-management to rhetorical appeals is to enroll in a public speaking class. These courses offer students an inviting space to practice their soft-skills, learn their strengths and weaknesses and generally become more adept at talking to crowds.

Upskilling your team can be a great way to increase productivity, improve workflow and generally make projects run smoother and more effectively. Regardless of the professional skills you are looking to teach, guided, hands-on instruction is likely to be to your team's benefit, and you can customize the lessons to ensure that your team is learning the skills they need to succeed in their future endeavors. You can enroll your team in a one-day Adobe course to teach them how to best utilize creative design tools like Photoshop or you can ensure that they understand the process of data analytics in a Python bootcamp. These courses are sure to help improve your employees productivity and the long-term health of your business.