Shop Talks: A Professional Development Series for Graduate Students

In this article, we present implementation strategies for a graduate-student professional development initiative entitled “Graduate College Shop Talks.” Shop Talks support graduate students’ academic success, research development, and career readiness by offering targeted workshops designed to build skills and raise awareness of resources in each of those areas. The initiative accommodates a range of student needs and interests through flexible formats, timely communications, and tailored scheduling. We use literature to discuss the need for an initiative of this kind, describe how Shop Talks are set up at our university, review feedback and response information collected at various times since we began Shop Talks in 2015, and then offer effective and sustainable guidelines for implementing a similar graduate-student specific series at other universities.