The Center for Professional Education at UT Austin offers courses, certificate programs and workforce training designed to build individual careers and support productive and efficient work teams.
Use the catalog below to explore our offerings.
For quick review of upcoming opportunities, you can also download this printable PDF that lists information sessions, certificate programs and courses starting in the next couple of months.
Today’s organizations depend on a wide variety of written communications⸺from short messages (texting, Slack, Discord) to longer ones (emails) to massive ones (proposals and reports). In this seminar, attendees will learn principles of communicating clearly and concisely so they can minimize mistakes and misunderstandings.
Being able to communicate clearly and effectively with others is a vital skill at work and in your personal life. If your colleagues continually catch you off your guard, or you struggle with sensitive situations or difficult people, or you just want to feel understood, this class will help. It incorporates a mix of interactive exercises, enlightening assessments and opportunities to practice new skills.
Learn to communicate with poise, diplomacy and confidence. Designed for individuals interested in developing essential skills for effective writing and speaking, you will learn practical tools and techniques to help you project a positive, polished and professional image in all written and verbal interactions. This certificate program requires completion of seven courses.
This course will teach you, while maintaining your true behavioral style, how to develop confident body language, effective conversation skills and how to successfully interact with others in both business and social settings. Participants will identify specific interactions they would like to master and develop a strategy to achieve their communication goals.
In this course, you will learn about the people, situations, and interactions that can result in conflicts and stress at work. You will discover practical approaches to maintain productive, positive relationships with a range of difficult personality types.
It is more important now than it ever has been to include well-designed visual elements in written communication. Research shows that readers first engage with the visual elements of documents before anything else. Attention to visual design helps readers determine a document’s credibility and usefulness. In this workshop, you will learn basic principles for constructing visually-appealing, functional documents.
In this interactive course, you will learn how to communicate intentionally, using techniques and best practices based on research and proven methods, to cultivate and hone more effective communication skills. We will explore and practice intentional communication skills, strengthen your listening skills, discuss the power of storytelling and learn about the power of questions, all of which establish a strong foundation for effective professional and personal communication.
Fostering open discussion is a challenge depending on a workplace’s discourse culture and an individual's willingness to be candid. In this hands-on course you will learn and practice appropriate strategies for inviting input, handling disagreement, coming to decisions and reporting decisions to insiders and outsiders.
Professionals who can write clearly and correctly save themselves and their organization's time and effort from repeated proofreading reviews. Small mistakes in writing can make significant negative impressions in the workplace and diminish your credibility. In this course, you will learn the standard rules for proper usage and grammar, including commas, colons, semicolons, parenthesis and commonly confused words like “effect” and “affect.” You and your fellow classmates will work in teams to apply what you learn in hands-on exercises and activities.
This course incorporates cutting-edge research from social psychology to TED Talks on building a positive mindset and managing speaking anxiety. Best practices in the slide design and special challenges concerning modern presentations will be explored, from webinars to video and phone conferences. Coupled with how to speak in a compelling manner, manage audience engagement, answer questions concisely, and other “quick win” approaches, this session will elevate your public speaking know-how. Activities and discussions will be incorporated throughout the class to guarantee a powerful blend of strategies and practice.
Whether it’s explaining the benefits and strengths of your ideas to upper-management, negotiating with customers or negotiating with coworkers, you are probably called upon to speak at work daily. But is your “vocal image” helping you or hurting you? There is more to our voices than meets the ear. A poor vocal impression can lead to diminished credibility, loss of support and even lost business. In this course, you will learn about the vocal range and practice the skill of voice projection in a professional setting. You will develop strategies to overcome common vocal issues, including having a high-pitched tone, speaking too softly or too quickly, straining the voice and not having enough vocal variety.
In this course, you will learn several tools and tips to help you speak with more confidence and ease at work and in social settings. You will have the opportunity to practice what you learn in a safe and supportive environment, including techniques to overcome the fear of public speaking.
Skillfully written technical material is able to clearly and concisely convey an understanding of new technologies, processes or concepts. No matter the reading level of your audience, the principles behind good technical writing remain the same. In this course, you will become more familiar and comfortable with the technical writing process and develop strategies to present technical details and data in the most easily understood and meaningful manner for your audience. You will strengthen your writing style and learn to employ design techniques that will improve your technical documents.
Strategic communications help organizations and their key audiences communicate across the right channels and with the right effect. To succeed, communications professionals need to think creatively about what will resonate with their audiences and use the right tools and media to reach them and have an impact.
How do business proposals work and what do you need to include in yours to accomplish your goals? In this course, we’ll approach business proposals as persuasive arguments, dissecting a proposal, examining its underlying components and putting it back together in ways that increase its effectiveness.
Whether you’re writing an email, building a website, creating a slide deck or posting a video, it’s essential to make that communication open and understandable to individuals with a varying range of abilities. This course will introduce and provide opportunities to exercise the practice of writing for accessibility.
Policies and procedures are important documents in any organization. Procedures that are effectively designed and written help both managers and employees increase efficiency and productivity, reduce mistakes and frustration and save time and money by providing clear guidelines that are easy to find and follow. In this course, you will learn best practices for writing policies, procedures and supporting documentation to help you develop logical and easy-to-understand documents. You will learn to prepare material that is consistently formatted, informative, appropriate for the needs of your audience and organization and ready for distribution both in print and online.
