MyGradSkills.ca is a resource for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to enhance the professional skills so that they can succeed during their studies and research, and in a range of career paths. MyGradSkills.ca includes a number of self-paced, online modules on a range of #GradProSkills topics, including teaching & learning, to career development, to community engagement, to entrepreneurship, and much more. As the site expands, we also will be offering blogs, virtual career panels, an information clearinghouse, as well as additional online modules.

Because our system keeps track of an individual student’s progress through the modules, even if a student changes universities, information about what modules a student completed will remain in the system. That makes it easier for students to transfer their completed modules and badges across universities. To start, all Universities in Ontario have agreed to accept module completions from each other; and as we add more partner universities in from other parts of Canada and around the globe, we expect they will allow the same sort of completion transfer, to maximize mobility for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Each university will decide how they will use the modules, some universities will be requiring certain modules, some will include modules as part of professional skills certificates, and others will treat all modules as completely optional. You’ll need to check with your own institution for more information.

Regardless of how the modules are treated at each university, though, all students will receive badges from MyGradSkills.ca for completing a certain groups of modules. We will be starting with 5 different badges, each requiring completion of 4-5 modules: Teaching & Learning, Career Development, Entrepreneurship, Research, and Communication. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be providing more information about the badges, so keep an eye out!

We have 18 modules available to start, created through our unique collaboration:

To view all of our modules - visit Courses on MyGradSkills.ca

We hope you’ll visit the site often, as there will be new content added on a regular basis. We’ll also be tagging posts with #GradProSkills whenever we can, and if you tag us in to relevant posts you make, we can share out your posts as well.

We are looking for ideas from students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, employers, and others about what they’d like to see in terms of future online modules, blog content, virtual panel topics, information for the clearinghouse, or even questions for the FAQ! If you have an idea, just let us know through our suggestion box on the mygradskills.ca homepage.

We are eager to hear all your ideas so that we can make MyGradSkills.ca as useful for everyone as possible.

Ontario’s Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities provided the Ontario Consortium for Graduate Professional Skills training with about $1.2M to create the site and the initial set of modules. All of Ontario’s graduate universities meet and collaborate on a regular basis, so the original proposal was intended to help all graduate students across the province (about 1/3 of all graduate students in Canada). Because, as far as we know, this is the largest Moodle implementation of its kind – serving about 65,000 individuals at the start – we want to be sure it is stable before opening it up to graduate students and postdocs from around the world. But rest assured, we already are working on plans to increase accessibility as soon as possible.

Everyone will be able access the website, blogs, clearinghouse, and virtual panels. Initially, the modules will available for to all graduate students and postdoctoral fellows (~65,000 people) in Ontario. Once we ensure the stability of the modules for such a large number, we are working on membership and partnership agreements to enable graduate students and postdocs from across Canada and around the world to access the modules.

MyGradSkills.ca was created by the Ontario Consortium for Graduate Professional Skills Training Development in a unique collaboration funded by the Ontario Ministry of Training Colleges and Universities, through their Productivity and Innovation Fund (PIF).  The Consortium comprised McMaster University, Queen’s University, the University of Guelph, the University of Ottawa, the University of Toronto, the University of Waterloo, and Western University.

We are working out plans to have the modules available in French as well as English in the near future – watch for announcements on the website. Down the road, we also plan to translate the modules into other languages, including Mandarin, Spanish, and Portuguese. If there is enough demand for other language translations, we hope to be able to add those in too. If you have suggestions for languages other than English, please drop us a note through our suggestion box on the MyGradSkills.ca homepage.