About
Skill Builder Seminars
Training & Development
Our Values
Growth Mindset
We believe people and organizations are capable of continuous growth. We embrace challenges, learn from experience, seek feedback, and continually look for better ways to perform. We don’t believe in standing still—whether it’s developing our clients, our trainers, or ourselves, we are committed to getting better every day.
Learning & Improvemet
We believe there is always a better way. We continually learn from our experiences, our clients, our trainers, and one another. We seek feedback, embrace new ideas, learn from mistakes, and constantly look for ways to improve what we do and how we do it.
Think & Act Strategically
We look beyond the immediate task and focus on what will have the greatest impact. We prioritize, make thoughtful decisions, and take action that moves us toward our most important objectives.
Team & Collaboration
We believe great results come from people working together. We support one another, share ideas, communicate openly, and work collaboratively toward common goals. We maintain a positive, respectful, and encouraging environment where people can do their best work and where everyone contributes to the success of the team.
Way Overdeliver
We don’t just meet expectations—we exceed them. We look for ways to go above and beyond, create unexpected value, and deliver an experience that makes our clients say, “Wow.” Good enough isn’t good enough. We take pride in overdelivering at every opportunity.
Take Ownership
We take responsibility for our decisions, our commitments, and our results. We don’t make excuses, blame others, or wait for someone else to solve problems. When we see something that needs to be done, we step up, take action, and see it through.
Mastery of Important Skills
We believe the quality of our lives and our results are largely determined by the skills we develop and apply. The quality of our communication, thinking, relationships, decision-making, integrity, discipline, actions, and work ultimately determines the quality of what we create. We are committed to continuously building the skills required to become more capable, effective, and successful human beings.
Our Mission
Skill Builder Seminars is devoted to imparting world-class strategies for achieving personal and professional quantum leaps.
About Skill Builder Seminars
For more than 30 years, Skill Builder Seminars has helped organizations, leaders, and professionals develop the skills they need to perform at a higher level and achieve extraordinary results.
What began with just five training topics has grown into a nationwide corporate training organization offering 30+ major training categories and more than 180 core training programs, delivered through a network of 2,500+ trainers and subject-matter experts serving organizations throughout 50 cities across the United States.
Our clients range from Fortune 100 companies and major corporations to government agencies, nonprofits, and growing businesses. They include Amazon, Shell, Summize, Toshiba America, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and hundreds of other organizations.
What Makes Us Different
We Model World-Class Performance.
Our programs are built around a fundamental idea: the fastest way to understand excellence is to study people who have already achieved it. We identify the strategies, behaviors, thinking patterns, and skills used by exceptional performers and translate those insights into practical training that others can learn and apply.
We Customize Our Training to the Max.
We don’t believe in taking an off-the-shelf program and simply putting a client’s logo on it. Every organization, team, and challenge is different. We work to understand the client’s goals, culture, industry, challenges, and desired outcomes—and then customize the training to maximize relevance, engagement, application, and impact.
We Focus on Results.
Training isn’t successful simply because people enjoyed it. We want participants to leave with strategies and skills they can actually use—and we want those skills to produce meaningful improvements in performance, productivity, communication, leadership, teamwork, sales, and the bottom line.
Our mission is simple: to impart world-class strategies for achieving personal and professional quantum leaps.
After more than three decades, that mission remains at the heart of everything we do.
What Makes Us Different
At Skill Builder Seminars, we believe exceptional training should do more than inform people—it should change what they are capable of doing and improve the results they produce.
Our approach is built around four principles:
World-Class Performance
We are skilled and trained behavioral modelers. We study and model the strategies, behaviors, skills, and practices of people who perform at the highest levels. We bring those world-class approaches into our training, so participants aren’t simply learning conventional best practices—they’re learning what exceptional performers actually do differently.
Extreme Customization
We don’t believe in generic, one-size-fits-all training. We customize our programs to the maximum practical extent around each client’s organization, industry, culture, challenges, audience, objectives, and desired outcomes. The more relevant the training is to the real world participants face every day, the greater its potential impact.
Practical Application
Our goal isn’t for participants to leave with a notebook full of interesting ideas. They should leave with skills, strategies, tools, and approaches they can immediately put to work. We emphasize practical application, real-world situations, exercises, discussion, and actionable takeaways that translate learning into behavior.
Business Results
Ultimately, training is an investment—not an event. We focus on how the skills developed through our programs can improve performance, productivity, communication, leadership, teamwork, sales, customer relationships, and other outcomes that matter to the organization.
World-class expertise. Customized to your organization. Built for application. Designed for results.
The Founder & CEO
Skill Builder Seminars was founded in 1996 by Alexander Van Buren. Van Buren is one of the world’s foremost behavioral modelers.
After becoming a certified Master Practitioner in Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) he spent 2 years learning how to ‘model something’ with NLP’. He conducted his first behavioral modeling project in 1997.
Determined to elicit the structure of creativity in detail, he read Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks every single day for two years while eliciting Walt Disney’s actual creative process and studying Peter Drucker’s concepts on innovation.
The project loosed a flood of creative ideas. He has conducted formal ongoing behavioral modeling projects ever since.
Over the next several years he elicited and created more than 170 original patterns of excellence and models.
He’s modeled the comeback strategy of tennis legend Andre Agassi, the delegation methods of a senior executive at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the sales techniques of selling champions at Bluegreen, management and leadership patterns from extraordinary executives, top-performing investment bankers at George K. Baum, the mental-game patterns of world-class athletes, and many more.
Alexander teaches many of the models, techniques, and patterns he’s learned in his seminars and coaching programs.
The team at Skill Builder Seminars is a hand-picked set of exceptional trainers who specialize in specific areas of business and personal development. Together, the Skill Builder team brings exceptionally unique training programs to business owners, entrepreneurs, leaders, managers, and teams.
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