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 ability to communicate in a clear, concrete, and concise manner is crucial to your success. Every time you participate in a meeting, give a project status update, lead a conference call, or engage in conversation with an organizational leader in the hallway - these are all opportunities to showcase your communication skills and positively impact how you are viewed in your organization.

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This course offers participants with an interest in public relations or organizational communications an opportunity to gain insight into the practice of strategic public relations and build the framework to implement an actionable, effective strategic PR plan.

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Digital assets are the essential building blocks of today’s digital world. Digital assets are images, videos, graphics, or any other digital file and the metadata that describes these assets. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is the blend of software and business practices to manage these many digital assets.

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In today’s world, defining health and disease are described not only by ‘evidence’, science, and medicine but also by communication, cultures, backgrounds, religions, the media, etc. Health literacy offers us different ways of thinking in regard to how we, as health educators and communicators, engage with information about and for health as both users and providers of health information.

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