Certifications Guide: Professional Skills

This course is specifically geared to help non-native English speakers improve their listening and note-taking skills when attending academic lectures. Learn how to take better lecture notes, techniques for improving your understanding, and how to give an effective academic presentation.

This course aims to equip students with the communication skills necessary to succeed in the workplace, taking into account how rapidly workplaces are changing in the 21st century. Topics covered include: the process and functions of communication, behavioural patterns, verbal and nonverbal cues, conflict resolution, communicating more effectively with technology, and more.

Communicating in a virtual medium brings different challenges than in-person communication. This U of T School of Continuing Studies course will teach you how to apply communication techniques and principles for in-person and virtual teams and refine your communication style to better persuade and influence others.

Get a hands-on introduction with this course, in which you will create an original infographic to visually represent data from your chosen field to explain a trend or theme of your choosing. In creating an infographic, you will also learn: what makes a good infographic, why they are effective, steps for planning an effective infographic, and more.

Diversity can be a tricky topic - we need to be able to recognize the differences among people, but recognizing these difference may at the same time contribute to discrimination. This course will help you understand this inherent paradox at the heart of diversity in the workplace, understand the dynamics this paradox creates, and ways to manage it in order to foster innovation.

Upgrade your Excel skills and become a spreadsheet pro with this specialization. Start with the essentials, like navigating the Excel interface, perform basic calculations, and format professionally and move to more advanced skills such as automation and conditional formatting that help forecast and model data.

A refresher course on the mechanics of good writing. Consisting of short video lectures, practice exercises, and discussion, this course will help you remember how to identify the correct verb tenses, use commas effectively, use different sentence types, and write more effectively in English.

Learn how to build your team, improve teamwork and collaboration, and sustain team performance. This course covers best practices around composing a team and aligning goals, as well as managing conflict and building trust.

This U of T course teaches you the basics of programming using Python. Learn about core concepts such as variables, mathematical expressions, and functions, and move into more complicated concepts such as Booleans, loops, tuples and dictionaries. No prior programming experience necessary.

This course aims to help you develop negotiation and conflict resolution skills so you can become a positive influence in your organization. The course consists of structured learning activities such as video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts, and written assessments to help conceptualize and measure power and politics, analyze and develop strategies for influencing stakeholders, and learn how to act with integrity and purpose in your interactions at work.