Badges

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Own Your Future's digital badges provide recognition of transferable skills that are valuable in multiple career contexts. Through cross-campus collaboration and partnership, Own Your Future offers badges to support graduate students in indentifying and articulating these skills. Once earned, digital badges can be displayed on a LinkedIn profile for greater visibility!

Explore below to learn more about the badges you can earn through Own Your Future and our campus partners!

Grant Writing Skills

Grant writing is a crucial component of academic careers, as well as some non-academic careers. The transferable skills developed through grant writing are valuable in multiple professional contexts and include persuasive writing, budget planning, and effectively communicating complex information in brief and accessible language.

Western's Faculty of Arts & Humanities offers a 2-day workshop annually in June for graduate students to develop fundamental knowledge and skills related to grant writing. Own Your Future offers a digital badge to graduate students who complete this workshop and submit a draft grant application demonstrating achievement of learning outcomes. For more information about this workshop, please click below.

Research Partnership Skills

Western Research offers a series of eLearning modules for their program, Research Engagement Collaborative Alliance with Partners (RECAP). These asynchronous, on-demand modules cover content to help researchers (including graduate students and faculty) enhance their ability to effectively undertake collaborative research opportunities while implementing co-creation design principles with diverse partners from various sectors.

To earn the Own Your Future digital badge for Research Partnership Skills, learners must complete RECAP Modules 1-3 and the corresponding knowledge check activity with a score of at least 80%. A link to access the knowledge check activity will be provided upon completion of the modules.

Important Note: You are welcome to complete the modules and knowledge check at any time, however, the badge will be issued only three times per year (end of January, May, and September). This means that if you complete the requirements in February, you will receive your badge in May, and so on.

Learning Outcomes

By completing these modules, learners will strengthen their knowledge and skills related to: building research partnerships and collaborations while working effectively and authentically with others; identifying mutual benefits and implementing co-creation design principles; overcoming power differentials when contributing and learning about multi-sectorial expertise, lived experience, and critical perspectives throughout the research process; communicating complex information with clarity and impact; acting with integrity and accountability while navigating complex situations; driving innovation and creativity while seeking out new challenges; and examining positionality while working to advance the principles of equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility, and decolonization in the workplace and community.

To access the RECAP modules and begin working on this digital badge, please click below.

Harnessing Generative AI for Research

More information coming soon.