Certificate Program

The Designing for Organizational Effectiveness Certificate is a cohort-based certificate program. A new cohort begins every Fall quarter. Candidates for the certificate must complete four required courses plus additional co-curricular learning activities during the program's one-year period.

All classes are delivered in our hybrid class format which allows you to pursue the certificate no matter where you live in the US.

Degree plus certificate option. You may choose to earn your certificate as an additional credential to the Master of Science in Learning and Organizational Change by integrating it within the 15 credits required for the degree.

Certificate-only option. You may choose to earn your certificate as a stand-alone graduate program credential by completing the four required courses plus co-curricular activities over one year.

A Foundation for Designing Organizational Effectiveness Solutions

The Designing for Organizational Effectiveness Certificate (DOEC) is for practitioners and leaders who wish to enhance their ability to lead change by putting people-focused strategies at the center of their change efforts. Accelerate your career by learning design practices – drawn from design thinking, agile and lean methods – and explore new ways to think about organizational effectiveness through a deeper understanding of collaborative technology, organizational design, and people analytics. 

By the end of the program, you will become skilled at tackling difficult challenges in an organization’s people strategy and have a set of practical tools and frameworks to advance your career.

As a participant in this program, you will:

• Learn how to leverage digital workplace technology to create communities and networks that address organizational challenges.
• Develop the capability for organizational design with a focus on organizational strategy, politics, culture, talent, and key processes.
• Gain experience in being a “data translator” to utilize people analytic techniques to diagnose and address organizational challenges.
• Learn to apply design thinking and its methods and practices to organizational challenges and to focus on continuous discovery, testing, and agility.

Apply Design Practices to Solve Organizational Challenges

Each of the first three courses – Creating and Sharing Knowledge, Designing Organizations, and Evaluating Evidence for Organizational Performance – provides an in-depth exploration of different ways to build your skills as a practitioner.

Designing Solutions for Organizational Effectiveness is the final course and capstone to the certificate program. In this course you focus on applying design practices and methods to a "design case" - a current, “real-life” organizational challenge that does have an effective solution yet.

Design cases are provided by the DOEC instructional team and are drawn from multiple sources and organizations, including MSLOC. We also encourage DOEC candidates to begin engaging in challenges from their own workplace.

The following examples illustrate the types of challenges we encounter in design cases:

• The move to remote work and remote learning due to COVID 19.
• The experience of new, first-time managers as they move into the role.
• Developing better opportunities for individual learning as part of an employee value proposition.
• Improving the ability of front-line staff to engage members of a not-for-profit organization.
• Providing managers with new tools to improve employee engagement.
• Developing new approaches to aspects of the MSLOC student experience, including equity and inclusion.

DOEC candidates must also complete certificate-specific co-curricular work during the first three academic quarters of the program. Co-curricular activities require approximately 6-10 hours of additional work each 10-week academic quarter.

DOEC Four Courses and Co-Curricular Activities