Employee Relations: Handling People Issues Fairly
Signature Course No. 148 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Employee Relations: Handling People Issues Fairly course, in the People, Culture & Engagement category. It does not play videos at you. It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room.
This is the course for people managers who hear concerns first, hold the difficult conversations, and sign the outcomes — for senior operators and shift leads named in other people's cases, for human-resources practitioners who advise managers on casework, and for owners and founders of smaller workplaces who are the appeal route, the record keeper, and the final decision-maker.
It works in the order a case actually runs. First, Module 1 — Hearing It Fairly — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The Fair Case File; then, Module 2 — Deciding, Repairing, Learning — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The Investigation You Can Defend.
You finish by proving the whole course — in The Fair Case File and in The Investigation You Can Defend. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free.
The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Fairness here is a process, not a feeling. Hear both sides, find the facts before you judge them, write down what actually happened, treat like cases alike, decide in proportion to what was proven, and leave a record a fair-minded stranger could follow.
The course teaches that process, step by step, on one running workplace you follow across all eighteen concepts — its rota disputes, its records, its mistakes, and its repairs — so every move is practised on a case you can trace from first knock to final record.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — a complete fair case file and hearing plan for a live dispute, and a full investigation and decision record, including its appeal handling and its repair plan — written to be used on real casework, not just filed in the course.
This is the one hundred and forty-eighth course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
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Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with how a case is heard. Most unfair outcomes are not decided unfairly. They are heard unfairly, sorted wrongly, or written down badly — long before anyone decides anything. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The Fair Case File for Module 1 and The Investigation You Can Defend for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
People issues do not arrive labelled, scheduled, or fair. They arrive as a knock on the door, a raised voice in a corridor, a resignation letter with one sentence too many, a rumour that has already done a lap of the building. How a workplace handles those moments decides whether its people trust it.
This course teaches the casework: the disciplined, human craft of handling a concern from the first hearing to the final repair. You will learn to receive a concern without pre-judging it, sort what kind of issue you are actually holding, find facts instead of collecting opinions, hold a difficult conversation without stripping anyone's dignity, and write a record that still makes sense to a stranger in six months.
Then you will learn the deciding half of the craft: when a formal investigation is needed, how to weigh evidence that does not agree with itself, how to choose an outcome in proportion to what was proven, who may hear what, how to deliver a decision fairly, how to handle an appeal without defensiveness, and how to repair a working relationship after the case closes — because the case always closes, and the people usually stay.
What you will learn
- Run a fair process from first hearing to final outcome: hear both sides, find facts, decide, and record
- Sort a people issue correctly — concern, grievance, conduct, performance, or a problem of another kind — before choosing a route
- Find facts and weigh evidence, including accounts that conflict, without filling gaps with opinion
- Hold casework conversations — hearings, fact-finding meetings, decision meetings — with dignity and control of bias
- Write documentation that holds up: dated, factual, plain, and followable by a stranger
- Decide outcomes in proportion to what was proven, consistently with like cases, and handle appeals fairly
- Protect confidentiality, repair working relationships after a case, and learn from patterns without leaking cases
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Employee Relations: Handling People Issues Fairly, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The Fair Case File and The Investigation You Can Defend
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the person a people issue lands with
Employee Relations: Handling People Issues Fairly is for people managers — who hear concerns first, hold the difficult conversations, and sign the outcomes, and who need a process they can trust when feelings are running high — for senior operators and shift leads, who are named in other people's cases, asked to witness, to supervise, or to change a rota, and need to know what fair handling asks of them,
for human-resources practitioners — who advise managers on casework and need a shared, plain standard for what good looks like from first hearing to appeal — and for owners and founders of smaller workplaces, who are, whether they applied for the job or not, the appeal route, the record keeper, and the final decision-maker.
Fairness is a process you can show. Hear both sides in full, find the facts before you judge them, keep the allegation, the finding, and the outcome separate, and decide only on what was proven — so a fair-minded stranger could follow every step in the record.
This is a People, Culture & Engagement course. It assumes you work with people and have sat through at least one conversation you wished you had handled better. It assumes no legal background and no prior human-resources qualification.
If you can listen to a whole sentence before answering it, you have everything this course requires to start — the rest is built here, concept by concept, on one workplace you will come to know very well.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The Fair Case File
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Employee Relations: Handling People Issues Fairly is Signature Course No. 148. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.