Return as someone your company counts on in a campaign.
Not a lecture on the NLRA. Two days of live campaign simulation, four coached conversation labs, and individual feedback on every call you make.
We built months of experience into a single week. Pre-work gets you ready to perform on day one. You will draft employee communications, make strategic calls and defend them up the chain, deliver employee meetings, and handle one-on-one conversations with people who are angry, frightened, or done listening. By Friday you have practiced the hardest parts of a campaign enough times to be confident that you know what to do.
Applications reviewed as received.
The people who get the call first
A campaign does not wait for the person with the most experience to be available. It lands on whoever is closest. Week 2 is built for the people who will be in the room in the first hour.
Named to the team, handed a plan, never given the chance to run it. You leave having run it seven times under pressure.
Strong HR practitioners moving toward labor relations work, who need the campaign side of the job on their record.
Site leaders who will be the most-watched voice in the building, and who have the most to lose from one careless sentence.
Leaders who own readiness across multiple sites and want a rubric-scored picture of where their organization actually stands.
Companies developing internal LR talent. Send two or three people from the same site and they practice as the team they will be.
Week 1, Proactive Employee Relations, is recommended but not required. Week 2 stands on its own and earns its own credential.
Talk to us about fit →Learn it, run it, then apply it to your own operation.
Pre-work lands three weeks out, so class time is for doing. Every day opens with a no-notes retrieval huddle and closes with a written reflection.
The NLRA where it actually bites, taught through a campaign case story you argue stage by stage. TIPS/FOE until it is reflex rather than recall. How first-contract bargaining really works, so you can answer the promises being made on the floor. Your first coached conversation practice, and a sealed baseline diagnostic you will not see again until Friday.
What you personally do in the first 72 hours, and what you escalate immediately. Campaign communication that works and communication that backfires, calibrated by scoring real company messages. Union myths answered with facts in sixty seconds. Then a surprise petition and 45 minutes to activate.
Two response teams, one campaign, four rounds. Early intelligence through the petition, the unit-scope call, and the employee meetings you deliver live to faculty playing your workforce. Injects keep coming through lunch.
Pre-election week, election day, and the day after — both outcomes. Then a decision-by-decision review against the rubric, with written individual coaching notes. Debrief time exceeds round time by design.
How to spot, document, and route a legal issue without stepping on privilege. Then the readiness rubric turned on your own company — early warning, team readiness, templates, supervisor training, legal resources, leadership alignment — a 90-day plan for your top gaps, the growth check against Monday's sealed answers, and your certificate.
A well-managed plant that is losing anyway
Two days. Seven rounds. Two teams running the same campaign in parallel, so Thursday's debrief has something to compare.
You are on the plant response team at a growing non-union site forty-five minutes from the company's shrinking union plant. Same product, same job titles, families split across both. The union ran a campaign in this building three years ago and lost by nine votes. They know it now. And the campaign runs straight through peak season, so every hour in a meeting is an hour off a line the company cannot make up.
The pressure is real. Several people above you each want something different, the deliverable is due in twenty minutes, and the operation cannot afford the downtime. Every round you produce real work, hand it up the chain, and live with what comes back.
What you walk out able to do
We teach you what to see, not just what to know
Experienced practitioners process a situation differently than novices do. We have identified twelve of those mental representations. Four are scored all week in Week 2.
Work product, not a binder
Everything you build in Week 2 is usable on Monday. That is also what makes this easy for your manager to approve.
Your own organization rated on early warning, team readiness, communication templates, supervisor training, legal resources, and leadership alignment — pressure-tested by a peer.
Milestones and owners for your top three gaps, coached by faculty and reviewed by your table before you leave the room.
The between-session assignment: members, roles, contact tree, first-48-hours checklist, and a supervisor talking points template for your company.
TIPS/FOE card, first-72-hours checklist, talking points templates, and a manager debrief one-pager.
Named feedback on your deliverables, your conversation practice, and your calls in the simulation.
A 48-hour recap and application challenge, a virtual cohort discussion at one week, peer coaching huddles, an accountability partner, and a refresher at two to three months.
Nobody else teaches this from your side of the table
Cornell's ILR School and Michigan State's School of Human Resources and Labor Relations both run respected labor relations certificates. Both are built to serve union and management representatives in the same classroom, both are delivered online, and neither covers an organizing campaign from the employer's side. That is not a knock on either school. It is a description of a gap that has been open for decades.
“[Participant quote — ideally the moment in the simulation where they realized their real plan would not have held up.]”
Every instructor is an active LRI consultant who has run real campaigns. Guest labor counsel joins for the current NLRB landscape and for the session on documenting legal issues and preserving privilege.
Led by Phillip B. Wilson, CEO of LRI Consulting Services and author of Left of Boom and Managing the Union Shop.
Apply for the founding cohort
Twelve seats, November 9–13, 2026, in Tulsa.
Founding cohort participants receive discounted pricing in exchange for detailed feedback. Take Week 2 on its own and earn the LRI Certificate in Campaign Preparedness, or apply it toward the full Certificate in Applied Labor Relations.
lrionline.com/institute