University of Connecticut Begins New Women’s Leadership Program

Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut has created a new online graduate certificate program to address the inequity in training young, emerging women leaders in order to train women to put leadership theory into practice in their respective fields.

The 12-credit, fully online Emerging Women’s Leadership Online Graduate Certificate is designed for those who have recently completed their bachelor’s degree and wish to better understand organizational change, as well as develop their creative and critical thinking and leadership potential.

“We are so excited to offer this graduate certificate as one way to support the development of women in leadership,” says Laura Burton, professor and head of the department of educational leadership at the University of Connecticut. “We know there are many options for leadership development out there, but the focus of our program is to support those emerging leaders who are just beginning or are in the early stages of their careers. We want to build a community of emerging women leaders who can work together to support one another and develop the knowledge and skills needed to make leadership accessible and available to everyone.” 

“If more women had access to practical ways of understanding what they’re stepping into, we may collectively be able to identify where the problems are within discriminatory systems and build a collective that facilitates action at scale,” added Jennifer Weiner, an associate professor and one of the faculty members for the certificate program. “We’re moving away from the idea of a leadership program in which women learn how to delicately walk a tightrope to be successful. We’re instead saying, ‘Why don’t we not make it a tightrope? Why don’t we make it a runway and allow people the opportunity to be their full selves at work?’”