WatPD: Your Online Co-op Courses

WatPD is a series of online courses all co-op students must take during their co-op terms to develop professional skills. Engineering students must take PD20 and 21 in the first two work terms. After the core PD courses are completed, students will be able to choose three additional PD courses out of six options. These options are:

• PD3: Communication
• PD4: Teamwork
• PD5: Project Management
• PD6: Problem Solving
• PD7: Conflict Resolution
• PD8: Intercultural Skills

These courses are designed to improve students’ employability and their workplace productivity. Many of the elective courses cover topics that will be very relevant to the workplace. For example, PD3: Communication covers many types of communication from proper behaviour during team meetings to effective email writing. PD5: Project Management introduces students to basic management science concepts. Topics in this course include basic project management techniques and practices such as planning, proposing, scheduling, budgeting, supervising, delegating and setting priorities. This is just a sample of some of the course descriptions. Full course descriptions can be found at uwaterloo.ca/professional-development-program/.

These courses try to be very broad in their scope and thus will apply to a variety of work environments. PD courses try to augment the transition from the class room to the work place. A majority of the topics can be naturally picked up after long exposures in a professional environment. These courses help accelerate this appreciation.

Since these courses are to be taken during the work term when students have full time jobs the work load is very light. Every course is a little different but they usually consist of weekly readings with an associated quiz or assignment. Each week’s work can be easily done within an hour. Some students opt to complete the entire course in a single weekend and forget about it. In addition to this, these courses are pass/fail and the mark will not appear on a transcript. This means that in order to pass one must achieve at least 50% in the course.. Engineering students have six work terms and have to complete five PD courses, so in the unlikely event that a student does fail a PD course, they will have another chance to make it up.