Course Catalog

Custom Training Available

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.


Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

This course will examine 11 essential leadership traits identified through a synthesis of data gathered from corporate recruiters, Fortune 500 companies, business schools and studies on how high performers manage extreme situations. You will learn how to apply these traits, combined with emotional intelligence (EQ) concepts, to real-world scenarios, developing the skills you need to succeed in today's high-performance business world.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Assertiveness skills are crucial for professional success in today’s ever-changing business world. In this course, you will learn how cultivating assertiveness skills in the workplace creates better outcomes for both managers and their teams. By identifying your personal blocks to assertiveness and then developing assertiveness skills, you will learn to communicate more effectively—asking for what you need, handling confrontations with confidence and advocating for your ideas. 

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Most individuals are not born leaders, and few people feel completely comfortable taking a leadership role for the first time. In this course, you will learn how to hone your leadership traits and enhance your knowledge of leadership principles through an understanding of the definitions, characteristics and coaching techniques of personal leadership. By developing a fundamental understanding of the leadership characteristics that any employee can utilize when presented with the opportunity to lead, you will be ready to accept leadership roles with confidence. 

Topic Area: Management & Leadership

“Psychological safety” is the term used to describe a shared belief that a team is a safe place for interpersonal risk taking. As a leader, it is imperative that you understand how your mindset contributes to a workplace where everyone feels that it is safe to speak up with questions, ideas, concerns or mistakes. But a growth mindset doesn’t just happen on its own.

In this course, you’ll gain practical tools for building an environment of psychological safety and developing a growth mindset. You’ll learn proven practices to improve workplace satisfaction and performance – for yourself and your team!

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

One thing is certain in the business world: You should expect the unexpected. Managers must work well under pressure, adapting quickly and confidently to changing, unpredictable circumstances. In this one-day course, you will be introduced to improv techniques that you can use in a business environment to enhance your ability to work effectively and efficiently, whatever the obstacles you face. This highly interactive course guides you through experiential learning activities, readings, and scenarios designed to take your quick thinking and ability to stay calm under pressure to the next level.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

In this interactive course, you will learn how to move from a management style to a coaching style in order to be a more effective leader for this growing workforce. You will learn the power of questioning, how relational psychological contracts work and why they are important, and how to give continuous feedback while allowing employees the freedom to grow and fail in a supportive work environment.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Learning to deal with conflict effectively is crucial to maintaining healthy professional and personal relationships. In this course, you will have an opportunity to assess how you typically respond to conflict and learn techniques to help address and overcome interpersonal conflict, tension, and misunderstanding. You will also gain awareness of the emotional and psychological processes occurring internally when you are dealing with stressful relationships and will learn skills to help you get to the root of the conflict in any situation.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

From solving problems at work to facing challenging personal situations, critical thinking is a valuable skill for everyone to master. Improving critical thinking skills will shape you into a more rational and disciplined thinker, reducing your own prejudice and bias, while helping you understand other viewpoints. This workshop provides you with the skills to analyze the way you think as well as evaluate, identify and distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information, leading to a more productive career.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Supervising others can be a tough job. Between managing your own time and projects, helping your team members solve problems and complete tasks, and helping other supervisors, your day can fill up before you know it. This course will help supervisors become more efficient and proficient with information on delegating, managing time, setting goals and expectations (for yourself and others), providing feedback, resolving conflict, accountability, and administering discipline.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

This highly interactive course will introduce you to the fundamentals of time management and planning. You will evaluate your work and personal life in a way you may never have done before—leaving you feeling empowered to execute your time-managed plans like you’ve always wanted. Become more aware of your relationship with time and learn rubber-meets-the-road practical tools and action plans to help you take control of both your personal and professional life.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Examining and cultivating your emotional intelligence is a highly effective strategy for improving your interpersonal skills and developing practices that will lead to organizational success. In this course, you will be introduced to the skill sets that "raise the bar" of leadership effectiveness, take part in practical exercises designed to increase your productivity and develop a personalized game plan for leveraging your emotional intelligence to be a high-impact leader.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Understand the basic types of negotiations, the phases of negotiations and the skills you need for successful negotiating with help from this workshop. Learn how to understand your opponent and gain the confidence to not settle for less than what you feel is fair. You will learn that an atmosphere of respect is essential, as uneven negotiations could lead to problems in the future.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

This individualized coaching session builds upon the lessons learned in Emotional Intelligence: Assessing and Maximizing Your Competencies and Skills and Applying Your EQ to Leadership. It is designed to guide you in developing a strategic flight plan through regular email contact and two personal coaching sessions with the instructor. The telephone coaching and email sessions also help you develop a personalized improvement plan by identifying habits that limit potential and professional development. This understanding helps break those habits, improve the emotional intelligence skill set, and pave the way to success.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Whether your role requires management of a team, supply chain, product development, inventory, contracts or sales pipelines, every business professional must be proficient at tracking, projecting and reporting financial information in order to be successful. This course will help you build essential financial management skills that will enhance your personal toolset and ensure that you apply best practices when managing fiduciary responsibilities.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Some say that leaders are born, not made. While it may be true that some people are born leaders, many leaders are born in the midst of adversity. Often people who have never been in a leadership role will stand up and take the lead when a situation they care about requires it. Explore the many facets and types of leadership in this course, from transformational leadership to differentiating between leading and managing a team. Conduct an inventory on your leadership skills and learn how to incorporate them into your professional life, enabling you to become an effective and approachable leader.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

In this course you will be introduced to the fundamentals of change management in an organizational setting. Learn how to address the impact of change—on your team, on your organization and on you.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

The transition from individual contributor to manager often happens quickly and may not include training or additional support. In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of entry-level management skills and techniques and develop an action plan for applying what you learn back on the job. With these skills, you will be able to manage with confidence and demonstrate success quickly in that all-important first management role.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Managers play a crucial role in any organization's success. Good managers know how to achieve positive results through their interactions with people. Motivating and retaining talented people can give your organization a true competitive advantage. This course provides provides an exceptional overview of management with particular emphasis on motivation techniques.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

In this course, you will learn how to manage without authority by developing a skill set that helps you manage a team that crosses departmental boundaries. You will develop strategies to help you complete projects on time and on budget. At the same time, you will gain valuable insight into how to build trust and help other team members realize their potential.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Moving a team from dysfunctional to cohesive and high performing requires every member’s commitment, effort and discipline, making this course a great opportunity for team improvement and professional development. Throughout the course, participants learn communication strategies, conflict resolution tools, and methods for building trust to help improve overall team function. Individual team members are also provided with specific feedback allowing for a better understanding of how individual personalities contribute to team development and success.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Effective leaders and managers influence people. When you're clear about your personal power of influence, you will be able to utilize your strengths to engage others, leading to increased team motivation and productivity in the workplace. In this course, you will gain a greater awareness of your ability to influence others in order to create a positive environment in your organization. 

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

The ability to self-promote is crucial for success in dealing with clients and for career advancement. However, even the confident and accomplished tend to flounder when asked to talk about themselves. You need to know how to introduce yourself, tell your story, connect to your audience, and discuss your accomplishments and qualities with ease, enthusiasm, and clarity. Gain tools and tips for promoting yourself in this workshop, and practice self-promotion to increase awareness of the impressions you make. Practice managing what you communicate to others with your elevator pitch, networking, personal branding, social media and business writing.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Secondary Topic Area: Project Management
Available For: All Audiences

In this course, you will learn the basic characteristics of a project and how to manage one effectively, explore key areas of expertise and learn how project stakeholders and organizational structures affect outcomes. Using A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), published by the Project Management Institute (PMI)®, you will discover the five process groups of project management: initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing.

Topic Area: Human Resources
Secondary Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

SHRM Essentials® of HR Management is an introductory course offering a complete overview of real-life human resource issues and important topics, including employment law, selecting qualified employees, compensation, new employee orientation, and training and the performance management process.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

This course will help you build a fundamental knowledge of strategic planning and goal setting, teaching you how to integrate both into the functioning of your department or organization. Ultimately, this course will improve how you collaborate with other leaders to engender an environment that creates purpose and meaning for all employees. In addition to learning the strategic planning process, you will have an opportunity to create a plan of action to immediately implement in your organization.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

The success of a team is determined by the interactions among its members. In this highly interactive course, you will learn about systems thinking, a management discipline that focuses on understanding a system by examining the interactions between its components.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

This course involves a 360° emotional intelligence assessment utilizing the EQ360. It is meant to serve as an outcome measure of progress and change after taking the self-administered Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQ-i®) as part of the Emotional Intelligence series. You will re-take the EQ-i® to rate your level of emotional intelligence, and select from among managers, peers, direct reports, family and friends, and others to also rate their emotional intelligence via the EQ360.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

This course introduces key principles and practical techniques to enhance your personal leadership presence. It will explore the skills of successful leaders that contribute to their leadership competency and teach you how to capitalize on your own leadership presence.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Transformational leaders create and sustain an environment that supports and excites employees and focuses on team-building, motivation, and collaboration at all levels of an organization. In this course, you will develop a unique transformational leadership mindset that goes beyond managing the usual day-to-day activities to create strategies for taking your team to the next level of performance and success. Learn how to set goals and incentives to motivate the team while providing opportunities for personal and professional growth for each member.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Emotional Intelligence as measured by one’s emotional quotient (EQ), can be several times more powerful in predicting occupational performance than IQ (intelligence quotient) because it reflects the ability to apply what you know to the real-world situations you face. This course is designed to help participants unlock their leadership skills through the power of Emotional Intelligence.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Women in the workforce face unique systemic and interpersonal challenges throughout their careers. In this highly interactive course, participants will gain tools, tips and practical experience to elevate their status in the workplace, speak with influence and rise above gender communication challenges. Participants will learn the strategy for lifting others up that was successfully used by female staff in the Obama White House and we will explore how gender roles, as well as our own behaviors and thinking, can impede our career advancement and satisfaction. In addition, we will cover key gender communication techniques that will empower you with concrete strategies to increase your confidence and enhance your professional communication and leadership style.

Topic Area: Management & Leadership
Available For: All Audiences

Is your inner critic, that pesky negative voice in your head, trash-talking your efforts? Are you noticing imposter syndrome, a feeling like you're not good enough and your colleagues or team will soon find out and be disappointed in you? Do you find yourself wishing you said the right thing in a meeting instead of what actually occurred? Or, are you hiding in your comfort zone, hesitant to take professional risks?