Essential Digital Employability Skills Program

Essential Digital Employability Skills (EDES) are basic skills and functions all employees need to professionally communicate and collaborate with colleagues and clients in the ever-changing digital world. The Purdue Center for Regional Development (PCRD) offers EDES through Purdue Online with free online tutorials through platforms such as Google, Microsoft, and GCFGlobal to provide a Purdue certificate or digital badge depending on the course.

Earn a Certificate

The certificate or badge fee for the program is $50 for Indiana residents and $55 for non-residents. Once participants register, they will receive additional instructions via email on how to start the course and assessment. Participants will have 60 days from registering for the course to complete the material.

Register now

Connect and Collaborate from Anywhere with Digital Tools

• Improve digital communication skills using online tools such as Email, Google Docs, and Google Hangouts
• Other extensions available: Direct messaging, Chat

Duration: 45 – 90 minutes

Communicate Effectively at Work

Learn effective professional communication skills such as:

• Organize a team meeting to inform, make decisions, and commit to actions
• Analyze feedback to realize patterns in the data or to identify problems and solutions
• Clarify and set expectations with an employee by sharing feedback in a video conference
• Develop a proposal to accomplish a business goal
• Evaluate and select a digital tool to meet a specific communications purpose

Duration: 6 – 9 hours

Send Professional Emails

• Understand how to write professional emails for specific workplace situations
• Understand situations in the workplace that require carefully worded and constructed emails
• Create draft emails for situations that might happen in the future, to have a professional email (almost) ready to send when needed

Duration: 45 – 90 minutes

Manage a Project with Digital Tools

• Learn fundamental project management tasks and digital tools to support effective project management.
• Create and share a document to communicate project details to stakeholders.
• Create and share a spreadsheet to track and organize tasks, schedules, and resources.
• Create a spreadsheet using formulas and functions to categorize and track expenses.
• Create a slide presentation to give a progress report on a project.

Duration: 4 – 9 hours

Certificate Requirement

Complete the online assessment upon completion of all courses.

Duration: 30 – 45 minutes