Does your company invest in professional development for its employees? If not, now is a great time to reconsider. Investing in the professional growth of your employees has many benefits that more than justify any associated costs. In this post, we’ll look at five different reasons managers should make skill development a priority.

If you've ever left the Portland area to live where English wasn't the main spoken language—or even lived in a neighborhood of Portland where English was less common—you know the challenge non-native English speakers face daily. Even people with impeccable language skills must process many cultural, contextual, and idiomatic elements of the workplace while also doing whatever work you hired them to do.

The United States gains a lot of strength from being a place where people from anywhere can find their place and succeed. If your workplace has hired non-native English speakers, you must make an effort to promote strong communication between colleagues of different backgrounds. You may also need to account for more considerable language barriers, such as when coworkers or employees do their work well but with intermediate English language proficiency, resulting in misunderstandings.

By improving office communication and helping everyone get on the same page, you can make your workplace a safe and prosperous environment for native and non-native English speakers.

The rental market in Portland is an exciting one. Many real estate investors have found success in purchasing residential or commercial properties to then rent to various customers. Many people opt to do this as they have the capital and time to do so, and as their responsibilities grow or decrease over time, they choose how much help to get with property-related work.

Whether you're a real estate investor who ideally manages all their properties or hires a separate property manager to handle the day-to-day for your rentals, you'd be surprised how valuable you would find an Oregon property management license.

Many people are looking for a career where, as their strengths mature and they gain experience. They'll see increased opportunities. Additionally, they value work that isn't wildly cyclical, temporary, or unstable.

Working as a real estate broker requires hard work, communication, and studying. Once you've made these efforts, you earn a steady, stable workplace. The need for housing is constant, and working under an experienced principal broker gives you access to the know-how you need to put your learning to use and gain a reputation for excellence.

With the real estate market's current competitiveness, it has become incredibly valuable to have a thoughtful, competent real estate broker. And this kind of market also benefits real estate brokers for their hard work. Now is the perfect time to enter this field, as many people buy homes in and around the Portland area. If you've thought about working in real estate and weren't sure how to get started, you might find that taking a course about careers in real estate in Portland is the right fit for you.

It's enriching to see your clients happy to have won a contract on a home they will love. Similarly, it can be great to see a client successfully sell their home and benefit from the cost competitiveness. Portland Community College is a great place to take a course that prepares you for the Oregon Real Estate Broker licensure process, and it's also a great way to get to know how the real estate business works.

Programmers are a diverse bunch, ranging from individuals who taught themselves a single useful coding language because it was helpful as an additional skill to extensively-educated programmers who can seamlessly work in many different programming languages and contexts. In general, however, programmers who want more upward mobility and to stand out among other candidates can add new languages and platforms to their repertoire as a way to grow.

One of the most impressive places to increase your skills is learning app development for the Apple App Store. The coursework needed to learn iOS Mobile Design and Development is surprisingly quick to learn and has many different applications. In a world where everyone from insurance companies to restaurants is trying to get their app designed to command more attention and commitment from their customers, app design and development are a highly applicable set of skills. You learn it through a two-part non-credit course offered at Portland Community College. If you've never considered learning how to code for iOS or build apps for iPhone, consider these applications of this skillset.

Updated March 18, 2022.

The average yoga class at a fitness center can bring quite many benefits. Even a one-hour intervention can help you develop flexibility, build strength, feel more relaxed, and even sleep better. However, many people who enjoy and benefit from a standard Asana-based yoga class may want to deepen their understanding, digging into the philosophies and body understandings that underpin the movements and guidance provided in a yoga class.

At Portland Community College, you can pursue a health program in Ayurvedic Yoga, which marries the ancient science of health and healing with the peace of mind and wellness that yoga can bring. If you want to learn how yoga and Ayurveda work together, this course might be right for you.

Updated March 18, 2022.

Yoga's popularity is undoubtedly spreading. What could have been a fad in the wellness and health industry has become an established practice for millions of people worldwide. It's no wonder studies have linked yoga to a variety of health benefits, from better blood pressure, higher endurance and strength, flexibility, and self-perceived lower stress. Anecdotal evidence has shown that people with various body types and states of wellness can benefit from the many variations of yoga's intentional breathing work, movements, and held poses.

If you're a long-time yoga instructor, you probably understand these benefits for yourself, and you have taken a 200-hour yoga teacher training registered through the Yoga Alliance. However, in pursuing a deepened practice, yoga teachers can take further training, a 300-hour course that prepares them to become registered yoga teachers at the 500-hour level (RYT-500).

Among the many benefits of this programming is training others to be yoga instructors yourself. Here are a few ways this certification can benefit you and teach you how to become certified to train yoga teachers.

More and more, people are turning their efforts to engage with the internet from laptop or desktop web browsers to app-based programs on smartphones and tablets. This shift has made what was already an essential app development field into an even more valuable area of focus. People are creating full-time positions and freelance roles with unprecedented flexibility simply by understanding how to design and code for Apple's iOS.

Whether you're an experienced coder in other contexts or new, a Portland Community College course in Apple iOS can help you jumpstart your career and enter new spaces of app development. Here's how to build iPhone apps using this knowledge!

When businesses invest in training for their personnel, they experience a range of valuable outcomes. First, the fundamental nuts-and-bolts benefits of whatever the training is, is moving employees to a new level of competence and knowledge.

Employees also typically appreciate the presence of valuable training opportunities, as it moves them forward in their careers and poises them for advancement. Finally, employees who share a common training experience also foster connections that they'd lack without the training; inter-office communication can often improve, as can team rapport and collaboration. 

If your team doesn't have a training division, it can be daunting to imagine creating training that is both attuned to what you need and doesn't take up resources required you could use elsewhere. A great compromise that promotes high-quality training without rerouting your on-site team is to find custom training solutions for businesses through Portland Community College.

If you're trying to figure out how to outsource training for my business, you've come to the right place. Training is more needed now than ever, and the benefits you can reap are huge.