Certificate Courses

Certificate courses feature a mix of online and in-person elements. In-person sessions will be hosted at The UM Detroit Center located on Woodward. Online elements are provided through Michigan Online and Coursera. Learners will have access to wrap-around services such as career counseling, peer mentorship, and free laptop loans for those who need one. Successful completion of these courses will earn you a non-credit certificate from the City of Detroit and the University of Michigan. All programs are free but learners must commit to attending the in-person sessions to be eligible for the certificate.

Current Course Offerings & Descriptions

Finding Purpose and Meaning In Life: Living for What Matters Most

1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., 3 week course (1/18 – 2/8)

Click here to register. 

Instructor: Vic Strecher

Course Facilitator: Kush Dawar

Welcome to Finding Purpose and Meaning in Life: Living for What Matters Most!

In this course, you’ll learn how science, philosophy and practice all play a role in both finding your purpose and living a purposeful life. You will hear from historical figures and individuals about their journeys to finding and living a purposeful life, and will walk through different exercises to help you find out what matters most to you so you can live a purposeful life.

As an added benefit, you will also have complimentary access, for a period of time, to the Purposeful App. This groundbreaking mobile and desktop app is designed to help you build a purposeful rhythm into each day, so you can bring your best self to what matters most. Look for more information in Week 1 of the course!

By the end of this course, you will:

  1. Understand that having a strong purpose in life is an essential element of human well-being.
  2. Know how self-transcending purpose positively affects well-being.
  3. Be able to create a purpose for your life (don’t be intimidated, this is different from creating “the purpose” for your life).
  4. Apply personal approaches and skills to self-change and become and stay connected to your purpose every day.

We are thrilled that you are here! We look forward to hearing and learning from you throughout this course!

Managing Talent

1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., 4 week course (2/15 – 3/15)

Click here to register.

Instructors: Cheri Alexander, Professor of Practice Management and Organizations, Ross School of Business; Scott DeRue, Edward J. Frey Dean of the Stephen M. Ross School of Business; Maxim Sytch, Whirlpool Corporation Research Professor of Business Administration Professor of Management and Organizations

Course Facilitator: Kush Dawar

In this course, you will learn best practices for selecting, recruiting, and onboarding talent. You will also learn about the key approaches to measuring performance and evaluating your employees. In addition, you will learn how to develop and coach your talent so that they can realize their full potential at work. Altogether, you will gain a thorough understanding of the complete cycle of managing talent and creating a robust talent pipeline for your team and organization.

Managing and developing talent is one of the top 3 issues on the minds of CEOs from around the world. In fact, CEOs cite managing and developing their leadership talent as the issue that is most important to the future success of their business but that their organizations are least capable of addressing effectively. This course will provide you with the insights, frameworks and tools to effectively manage and develop talent in your teams and organizations.

Project Management

10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., 7 week course

Click here to register. Note: this is a pilot cohort so spots are very limited.

Instructor: Nicole Friedberg, Master Black Belt and Project Manager, Lecturer for Michigan Engineering, Instructor for Six SIgma Programs; Pat Hammett, PhD, Lead Faculty for Six Sigma Programs, Associate Chair of Masters Education for Integrative Systems and Design, Lecturer for College of Engineering

Facilitator: John Knight

Project management isn’t just for project management professionals. People in almost any role in any industry will encounter projects at various points in their careers. With a methodical way to organize people, resources, and work, you can achieve your goals and meet project requirements. Foundations of Project Management can help individuals achieve their organization’s strategic initiatives by successfully leading projects. 

This course provides essential tools and strategies for anyone who is interested in project management, actively participates in projects, or leads projects. The online, self-paced course prepares you to implement new strategies and skills, preparing you for project success.

Python II: Python Data Structures

1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m, (1/18 – 3/15)

Click here to register. 

Instructor: Dr. Chuck Severance, Clinical Professor, School of Information

Course Facilitator: Tamara Qawasmeh

This course will introduce the core data structures of the Python programming language. We will move past the basics of procedural programming and explore how we can use the Python built-in data structures such as lists, dictionaries, and tuples to perform increasingly complex data analysis. This course will cover Chapters 6-10 of the textbook “Python for Everybody”. This course covers Python 3.

*Prerequisite: Take this course if you are: experienced in programming, have used Python before, or have taken the Programming for Everybody course as Saturdays in the D prior to this fall.

Python III: Using Python to Access Web Data

10:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m., (1/18 – 3/15) 

Click here to register. 

Instructor: Dr. Chuck Severance, Clinical Professor, School of Information

Course Facilitator: Tamara Qawasmeh

This course will show how one can treat the Internet as a source of data. We will scrape, parse, and read web data as well as access data using web APIs. We will work with HTML, XML, and JSON data formats in Python. This course will cover Chapters 11-13 of the textbook “Python for Everybody”. To succeed in this course, you should be familiar with the material covered in Chapters 1-10 of the textbook and the first two courses in this specialization. These topics include variables and expressions, conditional execution (loops, branching, and try/except), functions, Python data structures (strings, lists, dictionaries, and tuples), and manipulating files. This course covers Python 3.


*Prerequisite: Take this course only if you have completed at least Python Data Structures or have gained equivalent programming knowledge.