What is the Masterclass Series?
The Masterclass Series gives learners and alumni free access to monthly live online sessions, created to help professionals stay current with emerging tools, workplace trends, and practical career skills. Each month, industry experts deliver a live, 90-minute deep-dive into the skills shaping 2026. You’ll also have opportunities to ask questions and learn practical strategies you can use immediately. What’s included:
- One FREE live online, expert-led session each month
- Practical topics aligned to real workplace needs & trends
- Daytime and evening options available
- Attend live from anywhere
Free for all current UCD Professional Academy learners and alumni.* To access, all you have to do is log in to your LMS, and click 'Enrol Me' under the Masterclass Series on your homepage. You will then see all upcoming sessions.
*Only available to current or past learners. If you haven't learned with us yet, please enrol in a course to access. Dates & titles subject to change
Maintaining brand voice, trustworthiness, and distinctiveness is the new priority in an evolving marketing landscape. This insight-led session explores how to spotlight your humanity and ensure your communication remains authentic, avoiding the common pitfalls of repetitive or generic generative AI output.
Instead of falling into the trap of predictable content, you will explore practical frameworks for applying generative AI to reflect your actual brand and creativity. By clarifying your unique value proposition, you will learn how to stand out and build genuine resonance in a saturated attention economy.
Key Takeaways:
- Spotlighting Humanity: Learn how to prioritise your unique perspective and creativity to avoid the sea of generic AI-generated content.
- Voice & Trustworthiness: Understand the importance of maintaining a distinct brand voice in a landscape of repetitive marketing.
- Authentic Frameworks: Discover practical, simple tactics for applying generative AI to create content that reflects your actual brand.
- Value-Driven Connection: Clarify your unique value proposition to stand out and genuinely connect with relevant audiences.
Using AI at work requires more than just knowing how to type a prompt; it requires judgment. This practitioner-led Masterclass provides a role-based AI readiness audit to help you use tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot safely and effectively.
Grounded in real-world scenarios, this session covers the critical guardrails for confidentiality, accuracy, and bias. You will leave with a clear decision-making framework to determine which tasks are suitable for AI, and how to verify the results.
Key Takeaways:
- The Readiness Audit: A practical framework to decide where AI adds value and where it introduces risk in your daily role.
- Guardrails & Governance: Best practices for navigating confidentiality, data privacy, and policy compliance.
- Reliability Protocols: How to structure prompts and outputs so they are traceable and accurate.
- The Practitioner’s Checklist: Walk away with a job aid you can use immediately to validate your AI workflows.
Participants will explore what it truly means to lead through trust, autonomy and empowerment, and why well-intentioned “helping” can unintentionally create dependence.
Through a simple coaching framework, questioning techniques and workplace examples, managers & leaders will learn how to build capability and accountability in their teams. If you’re constantly solving problems for your team or colleagues and still feel short on time, this session is for you.
Key Takeaways:
- Recognise how “helping” can create dependence: Understand the hidden downsides of always stepping in with answers, and how this can limit team growth and drain your time.
- Adopt a trust-based leadership mindset: Learn what it really means to lead through trust, autonomy, and empowerment, and how this shifts team dynamics and performance.
- Use a simple coaching framework in everyday situations: Gain practical tools and questioning techniques you can immediately apply to develop others without taking over their work.
- Build capability and accountability in your team: Discover how to develop people who take ownership, solve their own problems, and contribute more effectively, freeing up your time as a leader.
Stop wrestling with AI tools that promise to save time but end up creating more work. While most professionals are experimenting with AI, an MIT study reveals that 95% of initiatives fail - not because the technology is broken, but because we don’t know how to communicate with it.
In this practical Masterclass, you will move from the frustrating trial and error phase of GenAI, to a reliable plug-and-play framework. We will break down the five most common prompting mistakes (like one-shot thinking and missing context) and give you the techniques to reclaim 5 hours of your week immediately.
Key Takeaways:
- The 5 Common Pitfalls: Identify and fix the mistakes that lead to vague or useless AI outputs.
- The Plug-and-Play Framework: Master a structure you can apply to drafting emails, analysing data, and automating repetitive tasks.
- Real-World Application: See live demonstrations across Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Customer Service.
- No Coding Required: Learn techniques that require zero technical background but deliver immediate productivity wins.
Networking doesn’t have to mean self-promotion or awkward conversations. At its core, it is a strategic career skill defined by clarity, relationships, and the value you bring to your work.
This insight-led session gently reframes networking from a tactic to a mindset. Instead of forcing connections, you will explore how your personal brand is shaped through everyday interactions and identify what might be blocking your visibility in the marketplace.
Key Takeaways:
- Reframing the Mindset: Move beyond "selling yourself" to building genuine, strategic relationships.
- Perception Audit: Reflect on how you are currently perceived and how that aligns with your career goals.
- Opportunity Mapping: Understand where opportunities actually come from and how to position yourself to capture them.
- Strategic Visibility: Learn why intentional networking matters and how to practice it without feeling inauthentic.
