Brush Up Career Skills with Professional Practice Curriculum Online

Professional and interpersonal (or "soft") skills are usually not emphasized in engineering school curricula, but they are critical when it comes to career advancement. ASME's Professional Practice Curriculum, http://professionalpractice.asme.org, offers 42 online education modules in which early-career engineers and students can brush up on those skills.

Several free tutorials are available, offering you a sample of the PPC program. ASME members can subscribe to the entire series for $95 — a $30 savings on the nonmember price. The introductory section of each module can also be viewed free of charge prior to purchase.

The ASME Professional Practice Curriculum was developed by senior engineers, managers, and faculty leaders for early-career engineers and students to supplement their formal engineering education. The modules concentrate on topics — such as management, leadership and communication — that will better prepare graduates for entering and moving ahead in the field. And, in addition to soft skills, some of the PPC modules focus on subjects such as sustainability, product development, and engineering design.

The PPC online classes are divided into 11 categories: career transition, management and leadership, entrepreneurship, legal and business, communication, project management, product management, sustainability, proposal writing, engineering economics and design, and sales and marketing for engineers.

The Career Transition Series, which is composed of five online courses, is available free to the general public. Modules in this series include "Studying Engineering," "Graduate Studies," "Introduction to an Engineering Career," "Mechanical Engineering and Multidisciplinary Thinking," and "Engineering Ethics."

PDF versions of five other PPC lessons —"Engineering Public Policy: Policy Gear," "Introduction to Intellectual Property," "Leadership Styles and Attributes," "Effective Technical Presentations," and "Product Management" — are available free to ASME members through http://my.asme.org.

The remaining 32 online modules, which can be purchased through ASME.ORG, tackle subjects such as "Communicating to Non-Technical Audiences," "Conducting Effective Meetings, "Negotiation and Communication Skills," "Mentoring," "Project Skills," "Product Planning," "The Technical Proposal," among others.

Each PPC module consists of an introduction followed by a list of sections that contain one or more pages with text, illustrations, and supplementary resources, as well as a student or professional edition designation that indicates the intended audience. A number of the courses contain multimedia features such as audio and video, or an interactive quiz.

To find out more about the Professional Practice Curriculum, visit the PPC Web site at http://professionalpractice.asme.org.

To purchase the complete set of PPC modules, visit http://catalog.asme.org/Education/OnlineProduct/
Professional_Practice.cfm. For more information, contact Amy Bentow, ASME Education, (212) 591-7880, e-mail bentowa@asme.org.

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