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Interactive, bite-sized instruction on even more key workplace skills: Sage Business Skills expands again!

Published by Mark Bodnar

Our popular Sage Business Skills resource has expanded! Sage has added one new skill to each of the five modules in the database:

logo of Sage Skills Business, featuring a search box. Click to access the database.

Data Analytics: Data Warehousing, Data Lakes and Data Lake Houses 

Entrepreneurship: Social Entrepreneurship 

Leadership: Followership 

Organizational Communication: Communicating with Your Manager

Professionalism: No Innate Talent Needed

Simple line drawing of a tree with many branches.

But that short list of the five newest skills doesn't really cover the breadth and depth of the entire resource. Think of Sage Business Skills as a giant tree: the 5 major modules (Data Analytics, Leadership, etc.) each branch out to cover 10+ skills (more with the addition of these 5!),  and each skill branches out even further to cover several topics... creating one great big bushy tree of knowledge!  

Altogether, there are 900+ topics in total waiting to be learned. That's 900 bite-sized, scenario- and video-filled topics that will benefit students in all disciplines... because we all end up in workplaces of some sort!

For instance, the new No Innate Talent Needed skill within the Professionalism module covers 7 topics, ranging from "Learn about your new employer" to "Meeting etiquette," as well as a "Test your knowledge" section that summarizes the skill and includes 15 multiple-choice questions students can engage with right within the platform. The skills added to the database in the past had similar self-assessments, but only at the level of each topic, not at the level of the complete skill. This new feature is a great self-check for students who progress through the entire skill and want to test their understanding of the content covered! 


 Highlight from the overview of 
No Innate Talent Needed:

 Landing your first professional job is one of the most difficult and stressful challenges faced by young adults and recent graduates. While you may think that it will be difficult to land a job because of your lack of technical knowledge, there are some basic things that you can do to rise above the competition you face in the job market. This skill illustrates things that you can do that require little to no technical knowledge, though they may quickly make you a standout at your new job! 

And the fine print on the super-useful Sage Business Skills is also all good news: 

  Each skill (e.g., Social Entrepreneurship) can be directly and separately embedded in Canvas, which means that instructors can build any section of the resource right into their courses. 

  We own the content published thus far in Sage Business Skills in perpetuity... which is a lawyer's way of saying it won't disappear right after you start to depend on it for a course.

  Our alumni get remote access to Sage Business Skills — so if their careers shift in odd directions in the future (more "when" than "if"!), they can jump back into the database to brush up on core workplace skills.

Screen capture of the "Embed" icon from within Sage Business Skills

Enjoy!

— Mark
-------------------
Mark Bodnar
mbodnar@sfu.ca
Business & Economics Librarian

P.S.: This resource used to be known as Sage Skills: Business, in case you were a bit lost.  And, for what it's worth, I think it should be called Sage Workplace Skills... the foundational skills they cover are valuable in every workplace, including nonprofits, government agencies, university libraries...

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