Mediation Training Professional Development Program

Mediating is an invaluable skill in any job. From sales negotiations to workplace disputes to legal arbitration, professionals in a wide range of industries face potential conflicts each day. This five-day meditation course helps students navigate themselves or their colleagues through these challenging moments. Using diverse role-play situations, mediation trainers helps students move from confrontation to collaboration. Mediators provide the necessary tools for understanding a variety of conflicts from multiple perspectives, ensuring the quickest and most effective path to resolution.

Program Audience

This program is excellent preparation for those who plan to enter the field of dispute resolution, arbitration and mediation. Professionals with a legal background or just an interest in the dispute mediation field are encouraged to enroll. The program will also benefit professionals in supervisory or managerial roles. Human resources professionals, corporate executives, and sales professionals from a variety of industries are just some of the individuals who have benefited from this program in the past.

Learning Goals

Over an intensive five-day program students will:

• Acquire the skills used to assist parties with divergent interests to reach a resolution
• Engage in simulated mediations to develop an understanding of the mediation process
• Work with coaches who have professional conflict mediation experience
• Set performance-based standards for evaluating their own work
• Learn about ethics in the field, opportunities in commercial mediation and arbitration, and how to start building a practice as a mediator

Our training is performance-based. Our coaches use a set of performance standards to evaluate the skills of each trainee and can use those standards to let trainees know what they are doing well, what skills they need to develop further, and how to develop these skills

Students who successfully complete this 40-hour program will be awarded a Certificate of Completion from Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies.

This program may also be used to satisfy the State of Illinois's twenty- and thirty-hour CLE requirements and also fulfills two hours of the four-hour professionalism requirement.

Northwestern's training program has been approved by the Presiding Judge of the Law Division of Cook County as satisfying one of the requirements to become a Certified Mediator in Cook County. Please see point 20.08 of proposed Local Rule 20 enacted pursuant to Supreme Court Rule 99.

For other SCS programs involving mediation, interested students can check out the Summer Institute in Negotiation. They can also obtain a non-credit professional development program certificate in Divorce Mediation, or a for-credit certificate in Dispute Resolution.

Custom Programs

The School of Continuing Studies works with corporate partners to develop custom Mediation programs to meet their specific needs. This program can be held at your company location.

Northwestern Excellence

• Northwestern University is a preeminent university recognized internationally as a hallmark of academic excellence.
• School of Continuing Studies programs provide students with exceptional opportunities for intellectual, professional and personal growth.
• SCS instructors bring outstanding academic credentials and relevant professional experience to the classroom to create a highly interactive, collaborative, and challenging learning environment.
• SCS students study with peers who have rich, diverse backgrounds and can provide lifelong learning connections.

Course Information

Registration information and detailed course descriptions can be found on the mediation training course listings page Note: Courses, prices and schedules are subject to change.

Mediation Training courses are offered at our convenient Loop location. Maps to all SCS locations are available. For the time and location of a specific mediation training course, please see the online course catalog.