If management is a career goal, you know that you'll need more than work experience to stand out for the next promotion. Getting a certification in management skills validates your competency to lead a team, giving your employer confidence that you have the skills necessary to manage a team successfully.

Many leadership certifications provide specific leadership skills you can implement in any industry. Some certifications are self-directed, and others have a virtual class element. Whatever learning style you prefer, you can find a leadership certification that teaches that way.

1. Coursera Strategic Leadership and Management Specialization

The certification involves seven courses that teach you the rudiments of effectively leading organizations, teams, and people and creating tools to analyze business situations. The courses take approximately eight months to complete, and there aren't any prerequisites.

By the end of the certification process, you will create a leadership and management plan where you implement what you've learned in a business situation. The certification provides a hands-on, experimental assignment that provides you with beneficial practice and creates value from a potential employer's perspective. The seven courses included in this certification are:

• Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
• Leading Teams: Building Effective Team Cultures
• Designing the Organization
• Managing the Organization
• Business Strategy
• Corporate Strategy
• Strategic Leadership and Management Capstone

If you're looking for a way to develop your leadership skills that isn't as time intensive, you may want to check out the tools every team manager and leader needs.

2. Udemy Practical Leadership Skills

The course builds critical skills for personal happiness, team motivation, and time management, whether you're managing an entire company or a small team. This course is for company leaders, founders, and anyone who manages two or more people hoping to get a leadership promotion in the future.

Pursuing Udemy's Practical Leadership Skills will cover:

• Why being replaceable is a positive.
• Making main academic theories practical.
• Developing skills and confidence in your employees.
• Creating the perfect balance of monitoring and delegating.
• Awareness of the common mistakes that negatively impact your credibility.
• How to personalize your approach and motivate teams.
• What makes a leader great?

The certification is 100% online and is self-directed, with 43 lectures among the seven courses with a running time of two hours and 51 minutes. If you struggle with sharing the workload, the section on finding a balance between monitoring and delegating may be beneficial. Delegation is a must-have leadership skill to reduce your workload.

3. Essential Management Skills for Emerging Leaders

The certification is for those who are new managers or those who are seeking to become one. It is a two-month program with a mix of online course material and a comprehensive classroom component, with project work requiring 10 to 20 hours of work outside of class time.

The certification instructors designed this certification to provide you with the skills to:

• Quickly increase your leadership skills and strategic viewpoint.
• Take on additional responsibilities.
• Build your effectiveness in an organization.

The topics covered in this certification include:

• Managing your mind: Implicit bias and the workplace.
• Change management.
• Creating a customer-centric organization.
• Negotiation and communication: An integrated approach.
• Cultivating a strategic thinking mindset.
• The power of leading with strengths and emotional intelligence.

Once you achieve your certification, you'll want to update your resume, adding management skills to show you are a good team leader.

4. International Leadership Skills for the Workplace

While there aren't any formal prerequisites to complete the certification, the course developers recommend having experience working in a leadership role. The instructors have designed the certification program to help you build the skills and knowledge required to succeed as a leader.

By completing the certificate, you demonstrate your understanding of authentic leadership and improve your leadership skills according to your position. The following is an outline of the courses you take for the certification. Each class is two weeks long and requires five hours of your time:

• International Leadership: The evolution of management and leadership theory.
• International Leadership: Ethical leadership and decision-making.
• International Leadership: Politics and philosophy in leadership.

5. Coursera Leading in the Modern Day Business

This is another certification that doesn't have any prerequisites. It takes four months to complete, with approximately two hours of work per week. The certification addresses the needs of modern-day businesses, which include IT, product management, digital transformation, and design thinking.

The specialization covers leadership competencies and what they mean for businesses. It includes four classes:

• Digital transformation
• Design thinking for innovation
• Digital product management: modern fundamentals
• Customer-centric IT strategy

The certification culminates with an applied learning project. In this project, you use the Boston Consulting Group digital transformation framework to establish an actionable focus to manage your product successfully and speed up the prototyping process to strategically align it for implementation within an IT infrastructure.

6. Inclusive Leadership by edX

The Inclusive Leadership certification is a 3-month course, requiring one to two hours of your time per week. In this course, you will learn skills to create an inclusive workplace culture, leveraging the power of diversity by strengthening your inclusive leadership skills.

The program teaches you how to apply inclusive leadership skills with E.A.C.H.

• Empowerment
• Accountability
• Courage
• Humility

There are three classes in this program, and each class is four weeks long:

• Becoming a successful leader.
• Get beyond work-life balance.
• Leading with effective communication.

The skills you learn in this certification can be included in the leadership skills that allow you to take control of any situation.

7. Udemy The Science of Leadership

There aren't any prerequisites for this certification. If you're accredited with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA), you will be pleased to hear that you will earn 4.6 credits when you complete this certification.

The instructors created this certification to bridge the gap between a hundred years of science and present-day managers. This certification is created for the following people:

• Managers in charge of a team.
• Managers seeking tools and insights that can help them manage their team more effectively.
• Professionals who want to upgrade their people skills.
• Professionals who want to learn more about human behavior.

The classes taught in this certification include:

• Introduction
• Our brain
• Our genetic programming
• Our prior experience
• Our environment/context
• Conclusion

The certification is 100% online and is self-directed, with 34 lectures among the six courses with a running time of three hours and three minutes.

Increase Your Chances of Getting Promoted

Having a degree or diploma may get you into the door, but continuous education is how to maximize your time once you're there. If you're a manager or striving to be one, then honing your leadership skills is the best way to achieve success.

Cost, time requirement, and the skills a certification provides you with are the factors you need to consider when deciding which leadership certification is right for you. Leadership skills can help improve your life at work and at home, so you might be interested in learning time management tips that can make you a leader in life and work.