Next semester, USF St. Petersburg’s Bishop Center for Ethical Leadership will begin offering courses in corporate training and professional development. With a suite of classes in topics like human resource management, project management and organization development, the training program is geared towards business professionals who want to cultivate their leadership and managerial skills, while advancing their careers.
“The Bishop Center has been looking to establish an external facing leadership program for a while,” said David O’ Neill, Assistant Director of the Bishop Center. By partnering with USF Tampa’s Office of Corporate Training and Professional Development, O’Neill said they’ve been able to accelerate the program’s development, adopting and adapting courses to fit USFSP’s interest in leadership for working professionals.
Although USF Tampa has offered continuing education courses for more than 20 years, the program was revamped a few years ago to put more emphasis on corporate training and professional development.
“Our tagline is, ‘Building a world-class workforce in the Tampa Bay Area and beyond,’” said Mark Koulianos, Executive Director of USF’s Office of Corporate Training and Professional Education. “We’re trying to extend that approach by lifting and shifting the courses we use in Tampa over to St. Pete.”
The programs being offered include an Elite People Manager Certificate; Human Resource Management; Organization Development and Leadership Certificate; Process Improvement; Project Management; and 5G Power Skills Certificate, which focuses on managing multiple generations in the workforce.
USFSP will begin offering corporate training and professional development courses through instructors from the USF Tampa campus. Later, the Bishop Center’s adjunct professors may take over as instructors for some of the courses. New, additional courses are already in development.
Founded in 2006, USFSP’s Bishop Center for Ethical Leadership promotes the study and practice of effective and ethical leadership through research, teaching and experiential learning. A minor degree in Leadership Studies is available to undergraduates through the Bishop Center.
“We want to create good leaders,” said O’Neill. “That is, good leaders who can be both effective and ethical. You can’t have one without the other and still have good leadership, so our goal is to elevate the conversation around leadership and change people’s perceptions about what leadership is.”