Hi my name’s Olamide and I’m a second-year Liberal Arts student and today I’m going to be talking to you about the different professional development certificates that Liberal Arts has to offer. In particular, I will be talking about the Certificate of Digital Literacy as that is one that I took in my first year.

Now, this certificate is all about getting to grips with the ever-changing digital-savvy world that we’re living in right now, and we learn a variety of things over the course of weekly sessions. Just to name a few of the things that we learnt, for example, we learnt about how to best utilise tech in a professional setting. One of the sessions that we did in my year was PowerPoint versus Prezi, so we looked at the benefits of using each type of format and which situations you’d want to use either. So for example, if you were doing a more formal interview you might want to do a PowerPoint, whereas if it was a bit more creative or a bit informal you might use a Prezi.

We also learnt things such as how to utilise different literary databases. For example, we learnt how to use the Warwick Library catalogue and we also learnt how to use platforms such as Google Scholar, which is obviously very important in an educational context and has actually gone on to be very, very useful for the rest of my degree and my learning.

In an educational sense, we also learnt about copyright and the reusing of digital information, which is obviously very important if you were writing an essay for example, and you wanted to use a picture. You’d have to properly know how to copyright it in order to properly cite it.

And finally, the task that I enjoyed the most was the final week task where we were challenged to create a social media platform. This week was so fun for me because my group and I actually chose to use my podcast as our main source of inspiration for the page, so we were able to create a really detailed Instagram page for the platform which utilised all of the different social media tools. We created stories and we used things such as the marketing tools and we learnt how to use those. That has been really helpful for me because it’s gone on to help with my careers pursuits currently because I currently work in the media, so knowing how to utilise platforms such as Instagram and Facebook is really, really important for different companies. That’s now a skill that I can say that I have because of the certificate.

Overall, I think that the certificate is really worthwhile because I think it’s really important to learn external skills alongside your degree and that’s something that Liberal Arts is really keen on doing. So now if I wanted to go and work for a tech-savvy company I can say that I’ve done the certificate and they’ll know that I am knowledgeable about these different things that might require me to do, which is obviously very helpful as it opens up new opportunities for me too.