The Graduate School delivers professional development courses which enable students to develop knowledge, attributes, and skills which are highly valued by a broad range of employers. All Imperial-Registered PhD students are able to take as many Graduate School professional development workshops as they wish, for free. However, the Graduate School is also able to provide a tailored programme of professional development opportunities to support cohorts of ITN PhD students, including non-Imperial registered PhD students. Courses can be chosen from the suite of existing workshops or developed on a bespoke basis. There is a charge for non-Imperial registered PhD students.

The well-established suite of face-to-face workshops has been recently reviewed by students and the  External Advisory Board, which includes industry representatives for example from the Wellcome Trust, BP, BASF and GSK.

The courses are grouped into the following innovation areas: Writing for Success, Perfecting Presentations, Communicating with a Wider Audience, Ensuring Integrity, Maximising Management Skills, Personal Effectiveness, Successful Interactions, Teaching, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, Computing, Information Management, and Careers. The Graduate School's portfolio includes a range of virtual interactive webinars. 

Examples of courses available are:

• Writing for Success 1: Literature Review
• Writing for Success 2: Publication
• Writing for Success 3: Thesis
• Ensuring Integrity 1: Plagiarism
• Ensuring Integrity 8: Science, Research & Integrity
• Maximising Management Skills 1: becoming an effective researcher
• maximising Management Skills 2: Time management for your PhD and beyond
• Maximising Management Skills 3: Putting innovation into Project Management
• Entrepreneurship 1: Enhance your Enterprising Skills and Attributes
• Entrepreneurship 2: Idea Generation and evaluation: Why didn't I think of that
• Entrepreneurship 3: Plotting a course for your venture: generating a business case and plan
• Entrepreneurship 6: Building an Enterprising team
• Communicating 1: Public engagement
• Communicating 2: Outreach
• Perfecting Presentations 2: Conferences and Seminars

We also have longer, award winning courses such as: the Finish-Up Move-On (FUMO) course; The Thesis Writing Retreat;  Team and Communications Retreat; and the Research Impact and Influence Retreat. These cover a range of team-building and professional development opportunities.

More information about the professional development programme can be found on the Graduate School's.

If you would like to discuss further professional development courses for your PhD students, please contact the Head of Postgraduate Professional Development, Dr Janet de Wilde.

Case Studies

• The Graduate School has  delivered FUMO plus a suite of courses including Preparing for Leadership, Networking, Grant Writing, Planning & Writing Your Thesis and Preparing for the Viva, to CardioNet students.
  
  
• We have also worked with the Marie Curie FP7 cohort to deliver Preparing for Leadership, Preparing for Interviews, Writing for Success 2: Publication as well as Perfecting Presentations 2: Conferences and Seminars
  
  
• We have also delivered Writing for Success: Literature Review, to the Marie ITN (NEXTGenAgriChem) cohort.

Additionally, we work closely with Directors of CDTs and DTPs and academic Departments to provide tailored workshops for other cohorts of PhD students. For example, we delivered the Writing Partners course to students in the Centre for Environmental Policy and the Effective Analysis for Journal Articles for Academic Writing course, to students in the Business School.

Our cohort building programme was shortlisted for a Times Higher Education Leadership & Management Award in 2015.

The Graduate School was invited to deliver a bespoke programme of professional development courses to employees of the Supreme Council of Health, Doha, Qatar. the programme took place over two days in Qatar and an outline of content and topics is given below:

Prioritising your work
Organisation and delegation
Planning to work efficiently
Setting goals
Managing yourself and others
Wellbeing
Networking
Delegates who attended the course were provided with a certificate of attendance from the Graduate School.