10 Active listening training courses
Active listening strategies can help your team build and maintain good relationships with their peers and reduce workplace conflicts. For customer-facing staff, active listening skills allows them to understand their customer and offer better services. Hone your team’s active listening skills through this list of 10 active listening training courses.
Active Listening
If you’re looking for an interactive training course that will fully engage your team, then SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Active Listening course teaches your team the core principles of active listening. It's perfect for people with no fundamental knowledge of active listening, outlining key listening strategies that can enhance communication and client relationships.
The second half of this course focuses on the bad practices of listening, which must be avoided at all costs. These bad practices include listening to what’s not being said and interacting with a lack of direct eye contact or expression for nonverbal cues. It also drills down the barriers to practice active listening alongside some tips to address them.
The course is made fully editable – for free. Thanks to SC Training’s free authoring tool, you can easily tweak the content and include additional learning resources. Even better, you can apply your logo so it matches your company’s branding!
Created by: SC Training (formerly EdApp)
Length: 5-10 minutes per lesson (self-paced)
Certificate: Available (for completion)
Cost: Free (up to 10 users)
Giving and Receiving Feedback
This SC Training course focuses on the crucial skill of active listening, which is essential in today’s workplace. Participants will learn how to give clear and helpful feedback while being open to receiving it without taking it personally.
Throughout the course, your team will take part in hands-on lessons that boost their active listening abilities. They’ll learn how to truly hear what others are saying, ask questions for clarification, and respond in a thoughtful way. The course also covers how to recover from negative feedback, which can help them stay resilient and focused on personal growth.
Built with busy employees in mind, this course has been structured to follow the microlearning design model. The lessons are divided into short and targeted slides that only take minutes to accomplish. This strategy effectively overcomes cognitive overload among your learners and increases their learning retention.
Created by: SC Training
Length: 5-10 minutes per lesson (self-paced)
Certificate: Available (for completion)
Cost: Free (up to 10 users)
Active Listening Training
Enrolling your team in this active listening training course by Professional Development Training will equip them with the basic knowledge of active listening. It will also help improve the way they give responses to their colleagues and clients, and build rapport with them.
Delivered in video-based content with quizzes, this course covers the definition of active listening, the difference between simply hearing and actually listening, and strategies to develop the ability to actively listen. It also emphasizes the importance of active listening in producing a more conducive work environment.
Active Listening Skills
SkillPath’s Active Listening Skills course will help your team explore the power of active listening. They’ll learn the key qualities that will make them active listeners and effective communicators, like good posture and attention to detail. It also covers how to properly interrogate someone to get the information they need without sounding defensive.
This active listening training course can be delivered using a variety of learning styles, including coaching, self-paced e-learning, and virtual instructor-led session.
Active Listening and Processing Feedback
Through this active listening training course by eCornell, your team will get to know how to use the HURIER model, a six-step framework for building and improving listening skills. They’ll learn how to create an action plan to improve their listening abilities and address any organizational challenges that are stopping them from effectively listening and understanding a person.
This course will also teach them how to process and respond to feedback, and use them to improve their performance. Keep in mind that this course is slightly longer than most of the courses on this list. It will run for two weeks, and your team will need to spend at least 3-5 hours per week completing this course.
Improving Communication Skills
Coursera's Improving Communication Skills course will teach your team to engage in active listening and ask thoughtful questions to a person. It will give them tools they can use to avoid misunderstandings, improve their communication skills, and build a trusting relationship with a person, a colleague, or a client.
Additionally, the most common cues of deception will also be discussed in detail, and some practical steps to take when noticing such behavior in the future. The course can be taken at your own pace with a deadline that can be adjusted to your schedule.
Effective Communication in Customer Service
SC Training’s Effective Communication in Customer Service course is specifically designed to improve the listening skills of customer service representatives. So, if you’re handling a team in a similar field, then this course is an excellent course to consider.
This active listening training course consists of three short lessons, covering topics such as the fundamentals of effective and good communication. It takes your team through the steps of active listening and offers some listening tips and tricks. There’s also a lesson on some of the most common difficulties preventing your team from actively listening.
Within these lessons, there are some mini-games and quizzes that can help amp up your active listening training. They follow a smartphone game format, making sure that your team’s fully engaging with their learning material while also learning effectively as needed.
Created by: SC Training
Length: 5 to 10 minutes per lesson (self-paced)
Certificate: Available (for completion)
Cost: Free (up to 10 users)
Active Listening Training
The experts of the Voice of Health have also put together an interactive active listening training course that will show your team the ropes of becoming a good-listener. It also teaches them to apply the principles of active listening and empathic listening when communicating with others.
Your learners will also get to explore the power of perspective and effective questioning, as well as the four levels of listening. Plus, the course follows self-paced learning, giving your learners the flexibility to decide when they'd like to take this course.
Active Listening
The Association of International Certified Professional Accountants,or AICPA sheds light on how active listening is the key to unlocking other soft skills like team management, critical thinking, collaboration, and more. This course will teach your team the different listening styles with emphasis on the benefits of active listening.
It's 100% online and will show your team how active listening can help reduce conflict and crisis and improve your team’s productivity. The only catch is that it’s not free, and purchasing it will only give your team access to the content for one year.
Handling Objections with Emotional Intelligence
SC Training’s Handling Objections with Emotional Intelligence course unpacks the skills needed to become a great active listener and discusses appropriate body language that your team must be familiar with. It also goes over some distractions that prevent a person from effectively understanding a person’s perspective.
Additionally, this active listening training course includes some strategies on how to resolve conflict without hurting the feelings of the other person. There’s also a lesson teaching your team how to take feedback like a pro, and use them as an advantage to advance their career.
All SC Training courses, including this free active listening training course, are all compatible with any device. Your learners are allowed to take the course on their desktops or smartphones, at their own convenience.
Created by: SC Training
Length: 5-10 minutes per lesson (self-paced)
Certificate: Available (for completion)
Cost: Free (up to 10 users)
When your team doesn’t actively listen, they’re more likely to misinterpret instructions and incorrectly execute a task. This means using additional time and resources to start over and redo the task again.
A manager or team lead who doesn’t actively listen can also be emotionally disconnected from their team. This might make it harder to address team members’ concerns in times of conflict and stress.
What is active listening training?
Active listening training is a program that focuses on helping your team fully understand what’s being said during a conversation. It often includes practical exercises and role-playing scenarios that put theoretical knowledge into practice, since every conversation will be different from the next.
An effective active listening course usually tackles the following techniques:
- Giving undivided attention and focusing on what the other party is saying instead of your response.
- Watching out for verbal and non-verbal cues like tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions that could add more insight on the true intent behind their words.
- Providing feedback by summarizing, rephrasing, or echoing the words back to confirm understanding.
- Keeping an open mind during the conversation even if you have disagreeing opinions with the speaker.
- Asking clarifying questions after the speaker is done talking. It’s advised to avoid cutting them off and let them finish their piece before thoughtfully replying.
What makes active listening so important?
Active listening focuses on fully understanding what someone is trying to say. It requires a full digestion of what’s being said for easier conflict resolution and effective communication. Here’s what active listening has to offer to your team:
- Strong relationships built on trust: makes sure everyone feels heard and understood, building trust and creating healthy relationships.
- Conflict resolution: focuses on understanding the perspective of each party to come to a solution that best addresses everyone’s concerns.
- Improved team collaboration: when everyone is free to voice out their thoughts, they’re motivated to share their ideas and feedback for a more fruitful brainstorming session.
- Boosted productivity: lessens the likelihood of miscommunication, reducing the risk of incorrectly executing tasks and minimizing the need for do-overs.
Help your team practice active listening with SC Training
A great deal of online training courses can help you build your team’s active listening skills. However, it’s important to look for features that empowers your team to confidently put their learnings into practice.
SC Training’s active listening skills training comes with carefully curated features that effectively trains your team to be active listeners.
- Gamification templates: motivate your team to complete their active listening training. Improve their retention of key information with gamification templates that keep them engaged throughout their training.
- Blended learning: conduct in-person active listening exercises to make sure your team is getting something out of their training. Our blended learning feature lets you track their performance in and out of the platform for a detailed analysis of their progress.
- Discussions: encourage your team to share a recent experience that left them feeling unheard. With the Discussions feature, they can practice their active listening skills and relate with co-learners all within the platform.
- Achievements: give recognition to team members who fully complete lessons in their active listening training. Achievements give your team milestones to reach, pushing them to complete their training faster with a little bit of positive reinforcement.
Teach your team to hear and be heard with SC Training’s active listening training. Sign up for free today.