Discover strategies to better manage your time.

By completing this program, you will:

• Identify strategies to take control of your daily schedule and projects.
• Discover how to get results without formal authority.
• Demonstrate your dedication to lifelong learning and professional development.
• Fulfill one of four mandatory training requirements for the state's Administrative Assistant Traineeship.

You can expect to enhance your job-based skills in the Professionalism and Self-Management workforce development competency. 
 

Explore all the courses you'll take in this program. You'll find the course name, a description, and the length of time it will take to complete each course below. 

Accomplishing Goals with Perseverance and Resilience (0.5 Hours)

We all encounter moments of adversity in our working lives, but it's how we face up to these challenges that determine our success in reaching our potential. Even the most gifted people risk failure if they can’t deal with adversity. Achieving goals requires determination, persistence, and adaptability. In this course, you'll explore how to overcome the challenges you'll face as you work to achieve your goals. You will also learn about the characteristics of an adaptive mindset and how to develop and nurture the personal persistence necessary for facing both day-to-day and uncommon obstacles that threaten to derail your efforts.  

Administrative Support: Interacting Effectively with Colleagues (0.25 Hours) 

Dealing with people daily can be both rewarding and challenging. Whether you're an office administrator, an office assistant, a personal assistant, or an administrative assistant, it's important to be able to handle various encounters professionally and effectively. Mastering administrator essentials and good peer relationships will increase your efficiency, job satisfaction, and career advancement. In this course, you'll learn how to master the skills of being an administrative support professional. You'll also learn how to interact effectively with colleagues by asking for help from others, dealing with criticism, and building trust, morale, and respect.  

Administrative Support: Working in Partnership with Your Boss (0.3 Hours)

Whether you're an office administrator, an office assistant, a personal assistant, or an administrative assistant, job satisfaction and career advancement require you to build a partnership with your boss. Good boss relationships involve mastering administrator essentials, dealing effectively with different management styles, and handling confrontations. In this course, you'll learn about building and maintaining a true partnership with your boss and how this can be beneficial. You'll also discover approaches for dealing with different management styles, as well as various techniques for handling any confrontations you may have with your boss.

Aligning Goals and Priorities to Manage Time (0.3 Hours) 

Meeting targets and achieving goals consistently, regardless of the business situation, isn't easy. A big part of doing this successfully is managing time effectively. In this course, you'll learn why it's important to align your goals with your team's goals, and you'll learn how to do it with a goal alignment worksheet. You'll also learn how to ask questions to clarify goals and how to establish and prioritize priorities based on these goals.

Be Productive by Working Efficiently (0.3 Hours)

Regardless of our own unique jobs and lives, we are all bound by time. It never stops and you can never get it back. Most professionals suffer from the constant and gripping fear of not having enough time. Managing time and tasks poorly can create more stress. In this course, you will learn strategies that help you manage your time efficiently and ensure that it is aligned with your goals. You will learn to assess the value of your tasks and how you can block time according to the priority of each task. You will also learn to create effective to-do lists and schedules that will help improve productivity.

Developing Personal Accountability (0.3 Hours)

If your manager’s approval isn’t quite enough to motivate you to put in that extra effort you need to get ahead, then maybe you’re ready to work on your personal accountability. Everyone must answer to an inner manager – an internal voice that tells you whether the job is done as well as you can do it. Choosing personal accountability means earning the approval of that inner manager. In this course, you’ll learn the behaviors of accountable professionals, including stating commitments clearly and following through. You’ll also learn how some very common behaviors, like making excuses and blaming others, work against accountability. The elements of an action plan for developing personal accountability are provided. Finally, you’ll learn how the members of a team can improve their accountability together.  

Get Organized and Stop Procrastinating (0.4 Hours)

Ever caught yourself mindlessly scrolling through social media despite having a pending task at hand? Do you get tempted to put off a difficult task? Then, like most professionals, you are exhibiting symptoms of procrastination, infamous for decreasing productivity in the workplace. In this course, you will learn to identify procrastination’s root causes. You’ll explore techniques to help you overcome procrastination and ways to strengthen your prioritization skills so you can stay on schedule. You’ll also learn methods for resisting distractions that lead to procrastination.

Make the Time You Need: Get Organized (0.3 Hours)

If you want to manage your schedule and make your time count, you have to be organized. But to stay organized, you need to check your progress. This means developing schedule management skills. The stress and potential for mistakes grows when you don't spend time organizing your time. In this course, you'll discover how schedule management can help you regain control of your time. You’ll learn how to leverage your personality to boost your productivity and explore techniques for dealing with time stealers. And you'll learn how to create practical to-do lists and keep them relevant and realistic.

Managing & Filing Email in Outlook 365 (0.5 Hours)

Managing the emails in your mailbox is crucial to staying organized and working efficiently. In this course, you'll learn how to effectively manage and file emails in Outlook 365. First, you'll see how to remove unwanted items by deleting or archiving them. Then, you'll learn how to keep your inbox organized by tagging and flagging messages, moving them into new folders and subfolders, as well as how to manage spam and unwanted messages. You'll also see how to preview and manage attachments. Finally, we'll cover how to translate messages in Outlook 365 to help you break language barriers. With these skills, you'll be able to stay on top of your email communication.

Organizing Your E-mail (0.3 Hours)

E-mail has dramatically increased the volume of communication and the amount of information that the average office worker needs to process every day. To keep up, you must sort, file, respond to, or delete every e-mail that comes to you during a business day. This course introduces techniques for managing e-mail effectively. It covers tips on how to use folders and filters to organize e-mails for increased efficiency, as well as guidelines on what e-mails to delete. The course also gives directions on how to recover important information should you lose an e-mail. 

Set Your Workspace Up for Success (0.5 Hours)

With professional lives getting increasingly busy, everyone needs help keeping up their levels of productivity. Being organized helps you get your work done right the first time, allowing you to be more efficient and more productive, which boosts your ability to achieve important goals in your career. In this course, you will explore effective methods of organizing your digital and physical workspaces to aid productivity. You will learn about tools that can help simplify and automate common tasks. In addition, you will discover effective techniques to organize your work life and cement your efforts at self-discipline.

Taking Responsibility for Your Accountability (0.4 Hours)

Accountability is a mindset – a way of thinking about how to take responsibility for your life and ownership of your decisions. Accountability tends to drive success; it is action-oriented and geared toward constant improvement. In this course, you will learn how to develop a framework for personal accountability. From the foundations of a framework to daily practices and sustained momentum, this course will help you take ownership of your goals and live your values.

The Art of Staying Focused (0.3 Hours)

Even if you know what's important to do and have an organized time management routine, losing focus can stop your progress in its tracks. In this course, you'll learn strategies for dealing with focus challenges and distractions at work. You'll also explore ways of saying no and consider ways in which you can adjust your focus in response to changing circumstances or emergencies. And you'll learn how to refocus when something causes you to lose focus.

Thriving with High-Pressure Work (0.3 Hours)

The stress that comes with work pressures can be overwhelming. But while you can't control the external events that lead to pressure, you can be proactive at recognizing stress and pressure, and consciously choose how you react. This allows you to use pressure to sharpen your focus and energize your work instead of being rolled by its force and dragged under its waves. In this course, you'll learn what situations are likely to trigger pressure, and how stress affects you physically and mentally. You'll also learn daily methods to make you more resilient to the challenges of pressure and stress, techniques for developing the mental flexibility to adjust to a high-pressure situation, and how to take action in the midst of one.

Using Business Etiquette to Increase Your Professionalism (0.3 Hours)

Business etiquette isn’t just about getting and doing things right, it’s about sending a message of professionalism and respect to superiors, fellow team members, and clients. When you are professional, polite, and appropriate in the workplace, you are taken more seriously. In this course, you will learn about the key components of business etiquette and how they apply in physical and remote office settings. You’ll learn the reasons that dressing professionally can benefit your career and the importance of maintaining an orderly and professional work environment. You’ll also be introduced to actions that ensure your communications, such as emails, texts, work chat, social media, and video conferencing, are at their most professional and polite. Finally, you will learn how tenets of business etiquette can be applied outside of the office environment at offsite events, business meals, and work socials.
 

Want to learn more? Once you've completed all of the required courses, consider continuing your learning with the following optional activities. Unlike the required courses, you do not need to complete these to earn your certificate. 

Digital Books and Videos

Discover a world of resources with the Empire KnowledgeBank (EKB) and Skillsoft eBook and Video Portal. Search EKBSS_TMPL20150123135209420 in SLMS. You'll gain access to the following free digital books and online videos, as well as thousands more! Get directions for using the EKB and Skillsoft eBook and Video Portal.

Recommended Reading

• How to Organize Yourself, 7th Edition, by John Caunt
• Influence Without Authority, Third Edition, by Allan R. Cohen, and David L. Bradford
• Successful Time Management: How to be Organized, Productive and Get Things Done, 6th Edition, by Patrick Forsyth
• Time & Stress Management for Rookies, by Frances Kay
• Time Management in a Week: How to Manage your Time in Seven Simple Steps, by Robert Ashton

Recommended Videos

• Choosing What Not to Do, by Murli Thirumale (4:00)
• Self-Awareness as a Tool for Productivity, by Nicole A. Lipkin (3:00)
• Tame the Email Beast, by Lisa Bodell (2:00)
• The Secret to Ultra Productivity, by Travis Bradberry (2:00)
• Time Management: The Six Box List, by Peter Bregman (3:00)

Training

These courses are offered by the Partnership and are open to all CSEA-represented NYS employees. Webinars can be taken from any device with a connection to the internet. You can also view recordings of webinars.

Recommended Courses

• Microsoft Outlook 2016: Managing Contacts and Tasks (Webinar)
• Microsoft Outlook 2016: Organizing and Managing Your Email (Webinar)
• Microsoft Outlook 2016: Working with Calendars (Webinar)
• Organizing Your Workspace for Increased Productivity (Webinar)
• Professionalism in the Digital Age (Webinar)
• Take Control of Your Time (Webinar)
• The Organized Office Worker

YouTube Videos

• 3 Awesome Tricks to Tame Your Inbox - Learn It in a Minute (1:59)
• How to Improve Your Concentration and Focus at Work (2:06)
• How to Organize Yourself at Work: Getting Your Desk and Work Organized (1:58)
• Time, It's All About Choices with BethAnne Kronick (3:35)

All CSEA-represented NYS employees are eligible to participate.

Management/Confidential NYS employees with an Empire KnowledgeBank (EKB) license are also eligible to participate. Contact your agency training officer for information on obtaining an EKB license.  

Supervisory approval is not required for courses taken outside the normal workday. It may be possible for employees to take courses during working hours with supervisory approval.

Register for the program anytime between now and February 12, 2026.

Take all the required courses online in SLMS anytime from February 14, 2025 to February 13, 2026.

To earn a certificate, you must complete all 15 courses and achieve a passing grade of 70% or higher in each course by the program's end date of February 13, 2026.

To print your certificate, log in to SLMS, go to the My Learning page, locate the appropriate certificate program, and select the Print Certificate button. The Print Certificate button will only be available if the status is Completed.

To participate, you must follow our two-step registration process. The first step varies for CSEA-represented NYS employees and Management/Confidential NYS employees. 

CSEA-represented NYS employees: Apply for a Partnership Online Learning License in the Statewide Learning Management System. Search P_OL_Program in SLMS. Please allow up to five business days for license approval.  

NYS Management/Confidential Employees: Contact your agency training director to obtain an Empire KnowledgeBank license if you don't have one already.  

Once you have an active license, you can register for the program in SLMS. Search P_OOW25 in SLMS.

register

Please be sure you're using Google Chrome to access SLMS. If you don't have the internet browser on your computer now, submit a ticket to ITS to have it installed. 

You will not be able to access any of the courses in the certificate program until you have followed the two-step registration process noted above. Please allow up to five business days for license approval. New state employees typically won’t get access to SLMS until after their first paycheck. 

Still need help or have questions? Contact us at (800) 253-4332 or email [email protected].