Advanced Communication for Professionals Program (ADC)

This course cultivates communication literacy and ethics. Through an in-depth analysis of messages used and abused in diverse domains (such as political propaganda, advertising, corporate language, social media, and televised news and entertainment), students will not only discover the private and public repercussions of communication misuse, but also learn to neutralize attempts at ideological, commercial and corporate manipulation. Students will also examine case studies of real-world business and professional communication that violates ethical norms.

This course focuses on refining and advancing students workplace communication abilities. The advanced communication documents and strategies covered include presentation skills, research skills, business document writing, meeting and management team strategies, business etiquette, and advanced employment communications. Additionally, students learn about interpersonal and intercultural communication (high/low and monochromic/polychromic context) concepts and strategies.

This course provides students with strong knowledge of the principles of clear, concise and correct communication. Students will analyze examples of written, visual and oral communication for their structure, style, tone, and rhetorical strategies, and will consider the relationship of the writer to his/her audience and purpose. Additionally, students will develop an appreciation of the stylistic and rhetorical conventions in specific professional fields (e.g. business, health sciences, technology, etc.). Finally, students will learn to apply these concepts to their own writing, and to construct well-structured and grammatically correct texts that fulfill audience needs and expectations.

In this course, the principles of effective leadership and management are examined with an emphasis on developing strategies for effectively managing groups of people. Situational leadership strategies will be analyzed with a view toward leading organizations through periods of change. Students work collaboratively to examine a variety of workplace issues thereby learning to provide effective leadership as part of the management team.

This course will focus on the application of psychological processes in the workplace with the goal of increasing communication and interpersonal competencies. We will examine the impacts of cognition, emotion, motivation, learning, and memory on key workplace issues, such as interviewing, teamwork, intercultural communication, and ethics. With an emphasis on organizational principles, students will develop strategies for fostering positive human interactions and productive communication.

This course will explore strategies for the successful management of conflict within professional domains. Students will examine the precipitating factors that can lead to conflict within a workplace, such as competing demands, deadlines, abrasiveness, discrimination, and hierarchical power structures. Students will also gain insight into the different facets of conflict resolution, including mediation, discussion and advocacy. Through role-playing and case study analysis, students will apply strategies for successful conflict management, with the goal of establishing and maintaining positive professional identities and productive group dynamics.

This course will prepare students for the technical and formatting challenges encountered while editing documents for diverse professional fields, including (but not limited to) the sciences, law, business, and media. An emphasis will be placed on transforming problematic, vague, and/or highly technical language into clear prose that is error free, sophisticated and accessible. Students will also learn strategies for working with documents generated by second language speakers. The ultimate goal of the course is to prepare graduates for editing a wide range of documents with varying levels of technicality for diverse audiences.

The hyper-connected 21st Century workplace has created new channels to produce digital media more rapidly, more often, and more widely than ever before. The ability to communicate clearly, effectively, and strategically in this environment is critical for reaching professional goals. In this course, students explore theoretical concepts, such as media richness and social presence, in various formats vital to the digital workplace. Students are also provided the opportunity to learn, develop, and apply web-based writing skills essential for career success and future growth. Subject areas include strategic web writing, designing for diversity and special audiences, the basics of SEO (search engine optimized) writing, social media management, and the principles of universal design. By the end of the course, students will have developed skills in constructing a range of representative web content.

Students learn the skills of Agile Project Development for high risk, high change projects. They determine how to develop and manage the product backlog, create and use effective users stories and develop project use cases to manage project requirements. Students role-play as ScrumMaster leaders and run mock planning sessions, re-planning sessions, planning poker, risk and retrospective sessions. Students will estimate project tasks using story points analyze and manage the project scope and expectations with stakeholders to deliver on the project.

This course will develop advanced presentation skills (including cultivating influence, personal impact, authority and natural presence), and will improve students’ verbal and non-verbal presentation skills in a variety of contexts. Students will structure and deliver professional presentations, both formal and informal, and will prepare appropriate accompanying visual aids; furthermore, strategies for handling questions, generating buy-in, and scripting effective narrative arcs will be covered. The course will also examine the ethical use of copyrighted materials in presentations within both corporate and not-for-profit contexts.

This course will teach students how to find, evaluate, productively engage with, and use research in their professional careers. The course introduces and develops two types of research skills commonly employed – and combined – to solve complex problems: qualitative (involving the gathering, selection, and analysis of both qualitative data and secondary sources) and quantitative (involving the generation and analysis of numerical data and its transformation into useable statistics). Students will synthesize qualitative and quantitative research to comprehend and solve sector-related problems, and they will document this research in the form of well-organized, persuasive forms of professional communication. The course will also reinforce compliance with intellectual property rights and use of appropriate styles of documentation when conducting research.

This course fosters students’ skills in developing in-depth, persuasive reports. In groups, students choose a detailed professional communication case study to solve. They work through it for the duration of the course, focusing on strategies for organizing, synthesizing, and presenting information, for collaborative writing, and for implementing clear, concise prose. Additionally, this course will cover the principles for attractively presenting visual data and incorporating this data within written documents. The reports that the student groups produce will adhere to principles that ensure real-world success.