As graduates prepare to enter the workforce in June, many will be negotiating their salaries for the very first time and seeking ways to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. With national student loan debt nearing $1 trillion and roughly 5.4 percent of borrowers struggling with repayment, learning to negotiate can make the difference between thriving and barely surviving.

She Negotiates is a training and consulting firm whose mission is to help women end the income and leadership gaps. Co-founder Lisa Gates says she wanted to “create foundational courses at lynda.com for women and men that set them up with the core skills for success and leadership.”

Lynda.com is a learning platform offering courses in business, software and design skills headquartered in Carpinteria. Gates says that in this “24/7, always on world, online learning is not just a nice idea, it’s essential for staying current.” She adds that her courses are “the trifecta for grads and careerists.”

The first course, “Negotiation Fundamentals,” covers the skills and strategies for negotiating everything from salaries to special projects to relationships. According to research cited in “Women Don’t Ask,” the groundbreaking primer on women and negotiation, women and men stand to lose up to $1 million over the course of their careers by failing to negotiate their first salary.

“What happens next in the workplace,” Gates says, “is discovering that human beings often have competing interests and new hires are often at a loss for navigating that complexity.”

Her second course, “Conflict Resolution Fundamentals,” provides the foundation for understanding the social psychology of conflict and gives sturdy ways to improve communication and move from conflict back to cooperation.

As a certified coach with training in mediation, Gates wanted to give careerists pointing toward leadership the same skills she uses every day in her practice with executives and entrepreneurs, so she went to work on creating her third course, “Coaching and Developing Employees.”

“Coaching in the workplace has gained fairly wide acceptance and adoption across the corporate landscape as a tool for supporting both high potential and low performing employees,” Gates says. “But emerging managers and leaders can also learn coaching skills as a tool for creating a culture that thrives on developing employees, and fostering engagement and retention.”

Gates also uses her Lynda.com courses with her corporate training clients who often have limited time to devote to professional development.

“With these online courses, our clients can now do some advance learning,” Gates says. “We then dovetail that into our live trainings to drill down into the specific issues and scenarios they need to roleplay and practice. It also means we can deliver a program in a half-day setting rather than a full day making it more time and cost effective.”

— Lisa Gates is a co-founder of She Negotiates.