Courses offered in the Development Guide

Employees of the UU (including PhDs) are given the opportunity to follow courses and training. The Development Guide offers a lot of possibilities to employees to enjoy work and learn new skills. The Development Guide is not only open for PhD candidates from the UU, but also for all the GSLS PhDs at the Utrecht Science Park. You need however, to apply for a Solis-ID. A few of the courses on personal effectiveness that are on offer can be found below:

Workshop Communication skills for difficult conversations

Are you perhaps someone who keeps postponing a conversation with a colleague or manager you should be having? Are you supervising a Master’s student you are dissatisfied with? Are there things you would like to say but don’t know how to? Do you dread certain conversations because you’re afraid of the response? Or is there something you would like to know but are afraid to ask? Utrecht University offers this communication skills workshop session to help improve your conversation skills.

The goal of this training session is to provide you with the requisite tools for having a better conversation when engaged in a difficult one. The session focuses on practical situations, using conversations and situations proposed by the participants to practise with.

Working in a diverse environment – dealing with differences at work

Every human being is unique and that also holds true at work. Unconscious bias is the way in which our brains compensate for overload. However, biases can also hamper collaboration, hinder performance and lead to poor decision-making. In this module, you will learn about your own unconscious bias and what you can do about it. You will get insight into the impact of our brain on bias. You will get greater insight into your own unconscious biases. You will get more knowledge about which biases are most common in teams. And you receive some practical tools and resources for making bias a subject of discussion.

PLEASE NOTE: the set of courses of the Development Guide are under review at the time of writing of this guide. So content and courses might change in the course of 2024