Introduction and guidance
This free badged course, Working in diverse teams, will help you consider your experience of working in teams and the different roles you play in them. It will increase your confidence in marketing this key skill to employers as well as improve your ability to perform well in teams you are currently part of.
The course lasts eight weeks, with approximately three hours’ study time each week. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete another week’s study.
As part of this course, you will undertake a number of interactive quizzes, of which Weeks 4 and 8 will provide you with an opportunity to earn a badge to demonstrate your new skills. You can read more on how to study the course, and about badges, in the next sections.
You have been provided you with an interactive toolkit in which you can collect all your thoughts together in one place. You will be directed at specific points to use the toolkit, however you can use the toolkit and the templates within it as you complete activities throughout the course, which will provide a resouce that you can draw on in the future to help shape your career. Using the toolkit is optional: if you would rather note your responses down in a different way, that is fine.
After completing this course you will be able to:
- understand why employers value working in teams as a key employability skill
- identify different team roles and your preferred team role, and articulate your experience of working in teams to employers with more confidence
- identify different stages of team development and understand why this helps team performance
- understand the benefits of increased team diversity and some of the issues this brings to team performance
- consider how a virtual team differs from other teams and the challenges of working in virtual teams.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each week, you can find a link to the following week. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Course content’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course. Alternatively, use the week links at the top of every page of the course.
It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button in your browser. You can do this by holding down the ‘CTRL’ key (or CMD on a Mac) and left clicking the mouse button; or right click and ‘open in new tab’.
The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.
Get careers guidance
This course has been included in the National Careers Service to help you develop new skills.