Post Expands Executive Learning

By Shelby Townsend
Staff Writer

The Lean Six Sigma yellow belt program is returning to LIU Post for the second consecutive semester. The two-day certificate program is designed to improve students’ process management skills to make them more productive in the work place.

The executive education program “improves the way you go about accomplishing a job,” said Dr. Kay Sato, director of The Hutton House Lectures. She used the example of planning a wedding and how people need to manage a variety of aspects, to describe what students learn in the class can be applied to real world situations.

This semester, there will be two sessions offered, one on April 23 – April 24, and the other on April 30 – May 1, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. everyday. The price will be $450 including a down payment of $100 at the time of registration.

According to Dr. Sato, the program immediately filled up, and the students who participated had very positive responses. In addition to the yellow belt program that ran last year, an additional green belt program, which is the next level within Six Sigma, was scheduled for the month of April this semester, but due to low enrollment the program was cancelled.

Sato said that the low enrollment was the result of the university receiving permission to offer the green belt program too late in the semester. The green belt program will be postponed until the upcoming summer or fall semester, but Post will continue to offer the yellow belt course.

Dr. Brian Galli, a professor in the computer science department, has taught the Six Sigma courses before at Stony Brook and now teaches them at Post. “The number one thing I would like students to take away from these courses is that everything can be viewed as a process and we should seek to create an environment that promotes continuous improvement every day,” Galli said.

The program is divided into a “belt” system and like karate; each belt means the person is at a more advanced stage in the process. The yellow belt is “an introductory course for process improvement team members,” said Galli. The next course is the green belt, where students will work on more projects and leadership skills. The black belt means students have more experience leading projects and are even ready to train. The highest level of the master black belt means that students have worked on multiple projects and trained and certified other Six Sigma users. Galli said that some of the classes involve case studies, videos, interactive exercises, and discussions.

“Professor Galli is so compassionate, helpful and thorough,” Dr. Sato said. “He’s the kind of person that engages you and attends to you if you have a problem.” Galli described the response he received from course evaluations last semester as “overwhelmingly positive.” “The students were very pleased with the course, the price the content and were seeking other courses in the field,” he said. Along with the green belt program that will hopefully come to Post this summer, Galli also plans to “build a black belt program in the future as well.”

Students can contact Dr. Sato or Dr. Galli with any questions about Six Sigma at LIU Post.