Workforce Skills

Manhattan College's non-credit programs offer practical courses for those entering or reentering the workforce.

Participants gain networking, resume building, and personal branding skills through various synchronous, asynchronous, and in-person class opportunities.

Program courses offer participants essential upskilling techniques and tools for roles related to leadership, administration/management, not-for-profit organizations, technology, and entrepreneurship.

Explore our Workforce Skills programs

  • Career Building: Ace Your Job Search

    This course helps learners craft a resume that is targeted, elegant, and effective. It covers interviewing skills, focusing on the interview preparation and the five stages of the interview process. The course help learners formulate winning answers to difficult interview questions.

  • Communicating With Flair

    Communication skills are integral to an employee's journey. Knowing how to craft attention-grabbing cover letters and resumes and ace a job interview are essential skills to master en route to finding professional fulfillment. The ability to manage speaking anxiety and deliver memorable presentations can set an employee apart from his or her peers. And understanding body language cues can help a worker build and sustain positive relationships with team members.

  • Computer Skills for the Office

    Technology has revolutionized business communications, and workers across all industries are now expected to demonstrate, at the very least, a basic level of computer literacy. In addition to understanding how to search the Internet and use word processing programs, workers can expand their career potential by mastering more advanced computer applications. Focusing on Microsoft Office software, these courses will guide learners through the tools and techniques needed to create products that both inform and impress.

  • Certificate in Creativity and Innovation

    This certificate helps you become reacquainted with your own stores of creativity and innovation. You are given a set of tools that allow you to leverage your creativity to identify and solve organizational problems.

  • Cybersecurity

    This certificate offers lessons on the critical elements of protecting data and personally identifiable information from malicious attacks. The program reviews information security and foundational information about key certifications for professionals in the industry.

  • Certificate in Entrepreneurship

    This program introduces key issues in entrepreneurship for those looking to start a business on their own. What does it take to build and grow a business from scratch? What types of resources are available to budding entrepreneurs, and where can you find them?

  • Excel Advanced Skills

    This course is designed for the learner who already has a solid understanding of Excel's basic tools and functions. The course teaches learners some of the more advanced skills and features available in Excel, which may be useful in data analysis. These skills include style templates, conditional formatting, data validation, data manipulation, and pivot tables.

  • Excel Basics

    This course focuses on mastering the fundamental tasks performed in Excel, including data entry, basic formula calculations, and formatting and style operations. During the course, you will learn how to build a spreadsheet from scratch and gain a greater understanding of the most popular Excel commands and functions.

  • Excel Tips & Tricks

    This course features 25 of the most popular Excel tip and tricks for both novice and advanced Excel users. In this course, you will learn time-saving techniques to boost efficiency, increase productivity and workflow, and improve and advance your skills. Topics include data entry, data organization, data cleaning, elements of style, data sorting, data filtering, and spreadsheet display tips. This course also covers three of the most popular lookup and reference functions: VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, and Find + Replace.

  • Certificate in Human Resource Management

    This certificate will teach you the basics of managing the benefits and policies that support an effective staff. What does an employer need to know about anti-discrimination regulations? What are the key aspects of pay policies? And how can employers avoid the traps of the employee selection process?

  • Leadership

    The courses in this suite offer advice on leadership that can help you stand out as a leader among your peers. Based on D. Quinn Mills' book, Leadership: How to Lead, How to Live, a text used at Harvard Business School, the courses in this suite offer advice on leadership that can help you stand out as a leader among your peers. Video segments introduce Dr. Mills and other leaders who discuss such issues as how leaders become leaders, leadership ethics, and the differences between leaders, managers, and administrators.

  • Women in Business

    The courses in this category are designed to uncover the various challenges that evidence suggests women in business are likely to face that are different (in kind or in scale) than those faced by men in business.

    These courses will seek to prepare learners to either start a career or to advance a career, by naming some of the systematic obstacles they might face, such as explicit discrimination, implicit bias, glass ceilings, assumptions about familial responsibilities, and sharing strategies for addressing those challenges.

  • Leading the Courtney Museum Simulation

    Whether you have years of experience in the nonprofit sector, or you're considering a possible career shift, this simulation is designed to challenge and engage participants while exploring key real-world leadership issues confronted by nonprofit managers. The learner assumes the role of executive director of the troubled Courtney Museum, and deals with a series of personnel, marketing, financial, and board and community relations issues.

  • Managing Change and Resolving Conflict

    This certificate covers the key issues and best practices for managers dealing with contentious workplace situations. Each of the seven courses in this suite offers examples, videos from practitioners and experts, interactive games, and review questions to ensure mastery of the material.

  • Microsoft Word Basics

    This is an introductory-level course designed to both build a foundation of essential skills in Microsoft Word and to gain a greater understanding of its interface and design elements. The course focuses on mastering the fundamental tasks performed in Word, including writing, proofing, finalizing, and printing a document.

  • Networking

    Networking is an important skill at all stages of your career, whether you're searching for a job or looking to take the next steps in your industry. This course provides an overview of how to make effective professional connections and cultivate relationships that can help you over the course of your career. It explores networking challenges based on gender and personality type and provides practical tips for overcoming networking anxiety. It also helps identify potential resources that can be used to expand your professional network.

  • Certificate in Non-Profit Management

    This online certificate program introduces learners to key current management issues for nonprofit organizations. Fundraising, board and volunteer development, budgeting, reading financial statements, leadership, marketing, and setting strategic direction are all addressed.

  • Personal Branding

    Employers use the web to check out job applicants, and they're increasingly likely to skip over those who don't have much of an online footprint. That's why it's so important for job applicants to have a strong and consistent web presence, one that announces and reinforces their own personal brand. Social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ can all be used to promote your personal brand. But building a personal brand is about more than just online self-promotion. Building your brand is a continuous process. It involves gaining new experiences, new knowledge and skills, expanding your circle of relationships, and increasing the value that you bring to every work project and business relationship.

  • PowerPoint for Business

    This course will consider how to plan and design effective slideshow presentations using Microsoft's PowerPoint software. It includes practical tips and examples for mapping the presentation, incorporating research, using templates, selecting visual elements, and delivering the presentation.

  • QuickBooks® Desktop Pro Basics

    QuickBooks® Desktop Pro Basics (2021 Windows) is an introductory-level course designed to build a foundation of essential skills in QuickBooks®. In this course, learners will develop a greater understanding of the basic bookkeeping and accounting functions that the software enables. The course content focuses on mastering the fundamental tasks performed in QuickBooks®, including setting up a company file and chart of accounts, entering customer and vendor information, recording sales, creating invoices, managing payables and receivables, creating and customizing reports, and using the Audit Trail.

    Click here for QuickBooks (Mac)
  • Starting Your Own Nonprofit Organization

    This course is a how-to guide for anyone who's got a great idea about how to give back to the community—but doesn't know how to turn that idea into a reality. The course begins by considering a fundamental question: Is starting a nonprofit the best way to achieve your philanthropic goals? For those who answer "Yes," the course then discusses the key steps in getting a nonprofit off the ground, including incorporating your organization; applying for tax-exempt status; drafting a business plan; choosing a board of directors and writing bylaws for the organization; recruiting employees and managing volunteers; and addressing the crucial issue of fundraising.

  • Starting an Online Store

    The emergence of eCommerce has dramatically reshaped the modern marketplace. Business owners are no longer anchored to a physical store—or stuck paying the overhead costs to operate them. Whether you know exactly what you want to sell or are still fishing around for ideas, this course will guide you through the process of generating product ideas, performing market and audience research, organizing a sourcing process, finding the best eCommerce platform, developing a shipping and fulfillment strategy, and marketing your online store to boost traffic and sales.
  • The First 30 Days

    The first 30 days provide a unique opportunity to set yourself up for success in your new role. Most significantly, your boss will form an impression of you from the beginning that will be hard to change. This course will help you prepare for your first thirty days on the job, laying the groundwork for a successful tenure in your new role and at the organization.

  • Visual PowerPoint

    In today's professional landscape, PowerPoint presentations can be effective platforms for sharing information and garnering audience interest and support. At the same time, a poorly designed PowerPoint slideshow can quickly turn an audience away. By focusing on how to apply basic design principles to slideshow creation, this course will help learners use Microsoft's PowerPoint 365 software to build visually engaging slideshow presentations. Learners will consider how to select images and photographs for use in slides, the importance of arrangement and placement of images, the use of tools like Shapes and SmartArt, methods for presenting data, and the selection of colors and fonts that increase the readability of content.

  • Web Design

    This certificate teaches the skills needed to build a website. The first five courses in the suite introduces the basics of designing a functional and attractive site, the HTML and CSS languages needed to execute the design, and best practices for designing and building a website.