Hi, my name is Drew Koch. I'm the Executive Director of the Institute of Certified Professional Managers and your instructor for this course in planning and organizing for supervisors. The second course in ICPM certified supervisor professional certificates specialization. For over 45 years, ICPM has been working to improve management at companies all over the world. We've helped hundreds of companies improve the overall quality of their managerial workforce and help thousands of managers to be both more effective and more efficient. The purpose of this course is to teach you essential skills and knowledge that will help you to become an effective planner and to organize your department for maximum efficiency. If you already do supervise others, these skills will help you be even more effective than you already are. You'll learn how to create plans by using appropriate planning tools and setting smart goals and objectives and how to apply techniques for making ethical, creative decisions and problem solving. You'll also learn how organizations are structured and how to utilize groups and teams for maximum organizational effectiveness and efficiency. Finally, you'll learn how to apply best practices for hiring, training, and evaluating employees. Either way, you'll find a detailed description of course content and learning objectives and the resources section of this course. We have designed the course to take four to five weeks to complete, with about two to three hours of work for a week. You can work at your own pace and you may take a little less for more time to complete the course based on your preferences in your schedule. We've provided a lot of resources to help you learn. Our video lectures and lecture notes in PDF format in the resources section of this course to go along with lectures. I recommend you print them out, follow along and take notes. For most people, writing things down helps them remember. As I mentioned before, you'll also find a detailed description of what will be covering in this course and the learning objectives that go along with it, and a few articles in readings of interest. Keep checking the resources area from time to time because will be adding new materials as we encounter things that are irrelevant to the course content. In these challenging times, good management is more important than ever before. Supervisors need to be able to meet those challenges and this course is your next step toward making sure you can do just that. To keep going, we hope that you enjoy our course and continue on to complete the certified supervisor certification. Thank you for your attention and time and stay well.