Professional Edge Events

Professional Edge events offer one-time professional development experiences where skills meet opportunity.

Professional Edge hosts a variety of dynamic, hands-on events and interactive workshops throughout the year tailored to your future career goals. These events are designed to help you explore new tools, sharpen your professional abilities, and gain confidence in your next steps.

Upcoming Events

View All Upcoming Events

Request an Event

Professional Edge Events are hands-on workshop sessions led by student peer trainers, and they are free to request. Student groups, instructors, and departments are all welcome, in groups of 4 to 24 people, in the CoLAB or in your own space. Most sessions run about an hour, and we ask for at least two weeks' notice so we can staff the session and hold the room. Click the "Request an Event" below to see open times.

• Who can request a workshop: UO student groups, instructors (for a class), and faculty or staff departments. Open to all majors and all experience levels.
• Cost: None.
• Format: In-person and hands-on. Attendees follow along on a computer.
• Location: The CoLAB, or the requesting group's own space.
• Group size: 4 to 24 people.
• Lead time: Requests must be submitted at least two weeks before the session date.
• Facilitated by: Professional Edge peer trainers.
• Materials: Workshop materials are shared with attendees through Canvas as part of the workshop. They are not available separately.

Available Events

• Work Smarter Not Harder: Word* (60 minutes) – For anyone who writes long documents and loses time to formatting and version confusion. Attendees practice structuring a document so it stays organized as it grows, working through edits with other people, and polishing writing before it goes out.
• Work Smarter Not Harder: Excel* (60 minutes) – For people who have a spreadsheet and aren't sure what to do with it. Attendees take a realistic dataset from messy to usable, pull findings out of it, and move the results into a report.
• Work Smarter Not Harder: PowerPoint* (60 minutes) – For anyone with a presentation coming up who does not want to spend a weekend on slides. Attendees practice building clean slides quickly, keeping a deck visually consistent, and using the tools that help on presentation day.
• Work Smarter Not Harder: Teams* (60 minutes) – For groups that have Teams but only use it for chat. Attendees set up a workspace the way an organization would, collaborate on shared files, and run a meeting together, all from their own laptops in a live Teams session.
• Notion (90 minutes) – Attendees leave with a live portfolio page they can share the same day. The session covers building the page, adding work to it, and publishing it to the web. A good fit for groups preparing for job or internship searches.

*Work Smarter Not Harder is the name of the Microsoft 365 workshop series. The four sessions are independent, so a group can request one or all of them.

Student Clubs and Organizations

We partner with student clubs across the Lundquist College of Business and beyond to co-create custom workshops and events that align with members' career aspirations. Whether you're interested in industry-specific training, leadership development, or technical skills, we'll work with you to design a session that supports your goals.

Popular event formats include:

• Industry tool trainings
• Communication and leadership development workshops
• Industry-specific upskilling

We love working with student leaders to support your club's mission and strengthen your members' readiness for life after college. To explore a collaboration, contact Trish Dorman at trishd@uoregon.edu.