What kind of professional do you want to become, and how can your everyday choices support that direction? This interactive course helps master’s and doctoral students explore their professional identity and develop self-leadership skills for shaping both work and personal life.
Using design thinking, guided reflection, and international peer collaboration, participants examine their values, strengths, and professional expectations; practise decision-making; manage time, attention, and energy; and develop strategies for motivation, communication, and boundaries. Students apply these tools to a real challenge, test small changes between sessions, and build a reflective portfolio connecting professional development with sustainable everyday practices.
How can you develop your professional identity and translate it into intentional choices and sustainable everyday practices? This interactive course helps master’s and doctoral students from any discipline explore who they want to become professionally and develop self-leadership skills for shaping their work and personal lives.
The course connects professional identity, self-leadership, and reflective practice through design thinking. Students explore experiences and needs, question assumptions, reframe challenges, generate alternatives, and test small changes. Short conceptual inputs support practical exercises, peer learning, and experimentation.
Six connected modules address:
1. Professional identity, values and strengths: examining aspirations, role models, disciplinary cultures, and expectations alongside meaningful roles beyond work.
2. Goals, priorities and decisions: clarifying direction, weighing competing commitments, and exploring options under uncertainty.
3. Time, attention and energy: developing realistic approaches to planning, focused work, workload, and rest.
4. Motivation, habits and action: addressing procrastination, perfectionism, and ambiguous tasks through practical experiments.
5. Relationships, expectations and boundaries: practising feedback, support-seeking, and negotiation with supervisors, colleagues, and collaborators.
6. Reflection, adaptation and development: evaluating experience and revising goals and working practices.
International peer collaboration enables students to compare professional expectations across countries and disciplines. Participants distinguish between individual choices, matters requiring negotiation or support, and wider institutional constraints.
Students apply the tools to a chosen challenge and develop a reflective portfolio documenting experiments, feedback, and next steps. Provided cases offer an alternative to sharing personal experiences.
At the end of the course, the learner will be able to:
• Analyse how personal values, strengths, disciplinary cultures, and external expectations shape their emerging professional identity and priorities in work and life.
• Apply a design thinking process to a professional or personal challenge by exploring needs, reframing the problem, generating alternatives, and testing a small-scale prototype.
• Evaluate options for a meaningful decision using explicit criteria, relevant information, and critical examination of assumptions.
• Develop and test strategies for managing time, attention, and energy across academic, professional, and personal commitments.
• Design and evaluate a working routine that addresses barriers to action, such as unclear tasks, competing priorities, or perfectionist expectations.
• Demonstrate communication strategies for seeking feedback and support, clarifying responsibilities, and negotiating expectations and boundaries.
• Collaborate with peers from different countries and disciplines, critically comparing the assumptions and contexts that shape professional practices.
• Produce a reflective portfolio that connects course concepts, practical experiments, and peer feedback with a plan for continued professional and personal development.
The course is open to master’s and doctoral students from any discipline. No previous study of self-leadership, professional identity, or design thinking is required, and prior employment or managerial experience is not necessary.
Participants should have sufficient English proficiency to engage in discussions, collaborate with peers, and complete reflective written tasks. Reliable internet access and a device suitable for live online workshops are required.
Students are expected to participate actively in workshops, complete short preparatory and reflective assignments, contribute constructively to peer activities, and test selected tools between sessions. Before the course begins, participants complete a brief questionnaire identifying their learning goals and a challenge they would like to explore.
Students determine which personal experiences they share. Provided cases offer an alternative for activities involving sensitive situations.
The course combines experiential learning with conceptual foundations in professional identity, self-leadership, reflective practice, and design thinking. Short assigned readings and instructor-prepared materials will support workshop preparation and reflection. These will be accessible through the university’s learning environment or library resources; no textbook purchase is required.
Recommended literature:
• Neck, C. P., Manz, C. C., & Houghton, J. D. (2020). Self-Leadership: The Definitive Guide to Personal Excellence (2nd ed.). SAGE.
• Ibarra, H. (2003). Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Harvard Business School Press.
• Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
• Burnett, B., & Evans, D. (2016). Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. Knopf.
• Burkeman, O. (2021). Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Reading guidance will identify selected chapters relevant to each module. Students will critically examine how the ideas apply to their own academic, professional, and cultural contexts.
The course combines interactive online workshops with individual reflection, international peer collaboration, and practical experimentation. Short conceptual inputs on professional identity, self-leadership, and reflective practice provide foundations for applying and evaluating tools.
Design thinking structures the learning process. Students explore experiences and needs through self-observation and peer interviews, reframe challenges, generate alternative approaches, and test small changes in real situations. They use feedback and reflection to revise their approaches.
Workshop activities include:
• Professional identity mapping and exercises exploring values, strengths, role models, and expectations.
• Decision-making scenarios and collaborative ideation.
• Time and attention audits, prioritisation, and realistic planning.
• Designing experiments to address procrastination, motivation, or working habits.
• Role-plays practising feedback, support-seeking, and negotiating responsibilities and boundaries.
Students work in international pairs and small groups to compare how disciplinary, cultural, and institutional contexts shape professional expectations. Structured peer feedback develops attentive listening, questioning, and constructive collaboration.
Between sessions, participants test selected tools in academic, professional, or personal contexts and record their observations. A reflective portfolio brings together their chosen challenge, application of concepts, experiments, feedback, and next steps. Reflection focuses on what students learn, including when an experiment does not produce the intended result.
Microsoft Teams supports live sessions, breakout activities, learning materials, submissions, and discussion. Materials provided in advance, clear written instructions, and opportunities for spoken and written contributions support participation. Students may use provided cases instead of disclosing personal experiences.
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