GPS 974: Graduate Professional Skills Certificate

Issuer: Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning, University of Saskatchewan

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This certificate program (GPS 974) is designed for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to foster the development of professional soft skills. In order to earn this certificate, students are required to complete a critical thinking (GPS 984) course in advance or at the same time while progressing towards this certificate.

In this course, my personal mission statements was developed as well as its associated learning goals, self-reflection and action plans. Various resources are available for me to execute my action plans, which support my mission statement, while progressing my professional skills in 10 different domains as the following:

Here is my final poster presentation that summarize my development in this certificate program:

Top Five Strengths

My main takeaway from this course is that I understand my key strengths much better. Why is it important for one to understand their own strengths? It is recognized that everyone possesses certain weaknesses, and we need to find ways to handle them. At the same time, I believe understanding our own strengths is also crucial to allow us to set more specific professional goals that will not just benefit ourselves but also people in our community. My top five strengths identified from this course based on the CliftonStrengths assessment are as follows:

Active Learner:

I intend to push myself beyond my boundaries and take on every learning opportunity. From time to time, I value spending time to examine my gaps and fill my weaknesses by expanding my capacities even if it is outside of my major. This is also the reason why I like to invest time in participating in many professional courses in different areas outside of my regular working hours.

Showing Empathy:

Dealing with failure and limitations can be overwhelming. Being empathetic is a unique strength that helps me accept my incompleteness and limitations, and more importantly accommodate the vulnerability of others. This strength of mine is extremely useful in my teaching environment when I keep reflecting on teaching strategies that are more inclusive.

Receiving Input:

There is a need to collect and organize ideas and information. Perhaps it is because of this strength that I like travelling around the world to absorb new information, which I believe will be useful one day. Having this strength also entails my desire of observing and organizing people's talents in my community and create appropriate platforms for them.

Being Strategic:

Creating alternate ways to proceed is a characteristics of this unique strength. This strength has shaped my personality of promoting positive changes, and I believe generating innovative solutions is essential in engineering professions. With this strength, I also challenge myself to draw links between problems, facts, or resources that would allow me to generate ideas quickly.

High Achiever:

This strength closely relates to my passion in planning and project management, where often multiple commitments are handled in a limited time. Instead of avoiding shouldering responsibilities, I actually appreciate being busy and productive. This also means I often like to set goals in every commitment to ensure efficient actions can be derived based on the goals.

By understanding my key strengths, it allows myself to develop my mission statement more effectively. For example, my mission statement relating to people empowerment and integration is mainly based on the foundation of my strength of empathy. My strengths of "active learner" and "receiving input" confirms my personalities and passion of pursuing continuous education, committing to professional development, and travelling around the world. On the other hand, the strengths "being strategic" and "high achiever" serve as my motivators to promote sustainable development and clean energy in my community and even globally.