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More workers are telecommuting in these past few months than ever before. Employees working from home are quickly learning the ropes of hosting virtual meetings and webinars over Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Skype Conference, or Zoom. Whatever your preferred online platform, there are best practices for making sure you appear professional and communicate clearly during any video conference or video project.

Whether you’re speaking in front of a few of your colleagues, clients, or industry experts at a conference, public speaking is always a bit scary. Your palms sweat, voice shakes, and you can only imagine the worst: forgetting everything you’ve prepared. Although the common bit of nerves might happen at first, public speaking doesn’t have to be a frightening experience. In fact, it’s an important skill in the communications field that can take years to master. Here are Denterlein’s tips and exercises for mastering the art of public speaking.

What does it mean to be a thought leader and why is it such a strong platform from which you can build your own brand or that of your clients? These days it feels almost impossible to read about strategies and tactics for career advancement without reading about the importance of becoming known and recognized as ‘a thought leader.’ Just what that means is open to wide interpretation.

In 1942, advertising executive Alex Osborn laid the foundation for cooperative group-thinking when he coined the phrase “brainstorming.”  His work as a creative theorist was unprecedented in American enterprise, and landed him advertising work with some of the era’s biggest industries including General Electric, Du Pont, and Chrysler.  However, 21^st-century psychologists have caught up to Osborn’s original technique, stating many shortcomings in his problem-solving strategy.  What they found was rather than triggering cooperation to “think up”, group-thinking can be restricted into converging on one idea rather than diverging into multiple ideas.  It took over half a century for scholars to agree that the outlines for brainstorming have changed, and executives everywhere are reinventing Osborn’s original design.  Here are five modernized practices for resourceful collaboration that go beyond brainstorming.