Professional Development Studies

Welcome to Professional Development Studies (PDS) at the School of Communication and Information (SC&I). Whether you are a young professional, new manager, or experienced executive you will find a wide array of continuing education programs that will help you enhance your skills and succeed in your career.

PDS offers four non-credit professional online certificate programs:

• Business and Managerial Communication
• Digital Asset Management (DAM)
• Professional Health Communication, NEW!
• Public Relations

Our new certificate program is for you if you are in the early or mid-stage of your healthcare career, if you aspire to a healthcare-related career, or if you want to pivot into this dynamic profession. Our certificate in Professional Health Communication uniquely combines communication, media literacy, and community engagement to help you enhance the skills needed to succeed in this dynamic profession. Our faculty and staff work with you on an individual basis to ensure you meet your professional development goals.

To earn your certificate, you must complete six courses. You can start our programs with any course in any month. The course schedule loops so that you can complete the program in six months no matter which month you start in.  You are also welcome to take stand-alone courses that meet your career development needs.

PDS certificates and courses are:

• 100% online 
• Four weeks long
• Instructor-led and self-paced
• Immediately applicable to your career

The reality of organizations today is that you will likely work on a team, if not many! A highly functioning team arrives at solutions and results that are better than any individual could have achieved alone. A dysfunctional team can create challenges ranging from distrust and frustration to ineffective business decisions and outcomes.

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Regardless of the communication task, communication professionals need to learn how to write persuasively. This course is ideal for the public relations or marketing communication professional with some practical writing experience, as well as novices, who want to bring their skills to the next level.

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A multi-channel, multi-platform world continues to increase demand for digital assets, and organizations that manage high volumes of content rely on creative operations as the cross-functional glue for marketing and communications, agency relationships, packaging, branding, publishing (digital and print), as well as other related aspects of digital assets within a business.

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Your gallery, library, archives, or museum (GLAM) organization is great at managing collections of physical objects, artworks, books, and ancient manuscripts. But now you've been asked to share your collections digitally or give your patrons, visitors, and audiences an incredible digital experience. Where do you start?

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The course is designed to look at communication campaigns design impact human behavior and are seen as an important method for health promotion (changing health behavior such as quitting smoking, wearing seat belts, etc). This course will examine the general principles of health communication campaigns and patterns of campaign effects.

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