Essential Career Skills Series
The Essential Career Skills (ECS) Series is an annual series that invites alumni guest speakers to share their experiences and the importance of developing your Leadership & Professional competencies to become career ready.
Each session in the series includes a guest speaker, activity, and discussion/reflection. There is a certificate of completion associated with each series.
If you are interested in the Essential Career Skills Series Certificate of Completion or interested in viewing the final recorded videos from the sessions, please register for the Brightspace course (NOT "Competencies - Facilitator Guide" or "Competencies - Student"). The Brightspace course serves as a central hub for the content from the Essential Career Skills Series.
Series Available Now
Currently, the following sessions from the ECS Series are available in the non-credit and free Brightspace course.
- The sessions from ECS Series 0 (Spring '22) under the module titled " Series 0 (SP 2022)."
- The sessions from ECS Series 1 (Fall '22 - Spring '23) under the module titled " Series 1 (2022-2023).
- The sessions from ECS Series 2 (Fall '23 - Spring '24) under the module titled "Series 2 (2023-2024).
The sessions from ECS Series 3 (Fall '24-Spring '25) will be made available by June 2025.
What are essential career skills?
Purdue provides students with rigorous academic preparation for entering their chosen career field. This consists of both general academic requirements (e.g., communication, science, mathematics and quantitative reasoning, and human cultures) and specialized knowledge in a major field of study.
Purdue University also provides for the acquisition of opportunity knowledge, acquired from experiences inside and outside of the classroom. As students participate in course and co-curricular activities (e.g., student organizations and campus employment) they are practicing and developing their abilities to communicate, process and apply knowledge and information, interact and work with others, and regulate their own behavior.
The 4 Leadership & Professional (LEAD) Competencies are essential career skills. They are the skills and abilities that employers expect new college graduates to have developed before beginning their careers.
Program Structure
Except for the ECS Series 0 (pilot series), all ECS Series occur in both the Fall adn the SPring semester with four sessions each. Each series consists of eight sessions.
- All ECS sessions are held in-person.
- For updates on session dates, please follow @lead_purdue on Instagram, and @lead.purdue on Facebook.
- Video recordings from the in-person sessions will be uploaded to the Brightspace course and the Roger C. Stewart Leadership and Professional Development Department YouTube page.
Students who were not able to attend in-person sessions can still earn a certificate by viewing the recorded sessions in Brightspace. The recorded sessions are uploaded to Brightspace during the summer after the series. See below for certificate reporting details.
How to Get the Certificate
Students must attend four of the eight sessions (either in-person, OR by watching the videos posted at the end of the year). Students will complete the certificate reporting survey form at the end of each module on Brightspace to report their attendance for the series.
Students will receive a "badge" from Brightspace once they have successfully completed the survey. This will notify our staff to review and confirm their attendance in the series. Once we have confirmed their attendance, we will issue a certificate through Brightspace that will be available for view and download the next time students open Brightspace.
A separate certificate can be earned for each series. Students can report their attendance at any time for any of the series going back to Series 0. Students will be asked to report how they attended each session: in-person, or by watching the recordings.
Associated Programs
The LEAD Essential Career Skills Series is associated with other distinguished programs on campus.
1) Earning a LEAD Essential Career Skills Series certificate will count towards the Career and Professional Development category in the College of Science, Learning Beyond the Classroom program. If you are a student in this program, please visit this page for more information.
2) The LEAD Essential Career Skills Series is associated with the Data Mine Seminar class. The Essential Career Skills Series sessions count towards an “outside event (PD)” for students enrolled in the 1-credit hour TDM seminar class. Any upcoming ECS sessions will be listed on the Data Mine Upcoming Outside Events.
Help
If you have any questions, concerns, inquiries, or require technical assistance regarding this course, please contact the Roger C. Stewart Leadership & Professional Development Department at leadership@purdue.edu.
