University of Mary Washington · Continuing and Professional Studies
Learn AI through the work you already do.
A stackable credential built around your actual role. Your AI guide learns what you do on day one and frames every lesson around it. You finish each badge with a real work artifact and a credential your employer can verify.
Self-paced. No live sessions. Around two to four hours per badge.
Your job changed. The training did not.
“Your job is changing on you even if you aren’t changing jobs.”
Most AI training teaches you a tool. Six months later the tool has changed and you are back where you started, holding a completion certificate that says you attended something.
The durable part was never the tool. It is knowing what these systems actually do, how to get reliable work out of them, how to tell when they are confidently wrong, and how to decide what is safe to put into them. Those skills transfer across every tool you will use for the rest of your career.
That is what this program teaches, and it teaches it using the documents, emails, reports, and decisions that are already on your desk.
Every badge ends with something you made.
Four steps, around two to four hours, on your schedule.
Tell us what you do
A short intake captures your role, your industry, the tasks you actually repeat, and what you are and are not allowed to put into an AI tool. It takes about ninety seconds and it shapes everything after it.
Learn it framed around your work
The lesson uses your examples, not somebody else's. A quality engineer works through nonconformance reports. A practice manager works through patient intake letters. Read it, listen to it, or both.
Talk it through
A one-on-one conversation with your AI guide that does not accept your first answer. This is where most people find the gap they did not know they had.
Produce the evidence
You submit a real artifact from your own work, scored against a published rubric. That artifact is what earns the badge, and it is yours to keep and to use on Monday.
Meet Anand.AI
An AI guide that knows what you do.
Anand.AI learns your role, your industry, and your goal on day one, and then frames every badge around them. It asks follow-up questions. It notices when an answer is thin. It does not grade you, and the program spends an entire micro-credential teaching you how to check whether it is right.
- It remembers.
- Your context carries from badge one to your capstone, so you never re-explain your job.
- It knows your constraints.
- If your organization has told us which tools are approved for which kinds of data, the guide answers that question directly instead of telling you to ask someone.
- It is transparent.
- You can see your own profile at any time, exactly as the guide sees it, and change anything in it.
Designed by Dr. Anand Rao, Director of the Center for AI and the Liberal Arts.
Anand.AI is an AI system. It can be wrong, and the program teaches you to verify it.
- Role
- Senior Quality Engineer
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- Task I repeat
- CAPA narratives
Large language models generate text by predicting the next token in a sequence.
When you draft a CAPA narrative, the system is predicting likely wording, not checking your root cause. Here is what that means for the next one you write.
Rewritten for your intakeFourteen badges. Five micro-credentials. Start anywhere that fits your job.
A badge is one verifiable skill, around two to four hours plus an artifact. Three to four badges make a micro-credential, which is a workplace competency you can put on a résumé. Micro-credentials stack toward a certificate as the university’s approval process completes.
Building and Automating with AI
Work across images and documents, build assistants, use agents, automate what you repeat.
For: Practitioners ready to build.
AI Governance and Leadership
Governance frameworks and how to lead an adoption that actually lands.
For: Managers, IT, and risk.
Applied AI Practitioner
Where your career is going, and a capstone that solves a real problem at your organization.
For: Anyone finishing the ladder.
Responsible and Trustworthy AI
For: Everyone, especially regulated work.Use AI with integrity, recognize bias, and catch confident errors before they reach a customer.3 badgesAI Fluency for Professionals
Start here, everyoneFor: Everyone. Start here.Understand what these systems do, get reliable results, choose the right tool.3 badges- 1.1AI Foundations
- 1.2Prompting and Communicating with AI
- 1.3Choosing and Using AI Tools
MC2 is the one that makes this different from vendor training. Anyone can teach you to prompt. Very little training teaches you when not to.
“Most organizations train employees to use AI tools, not to think critically with them.”
Meet Anand.AI, your AI learning guide
Anand.AI learns your role, industry, and goal on day one, then frames every badge around your work — a marketer drills prompting on campaign briefs, a clinical manager pressure-tests tool choices against patient-data rules. Anand.AI coaches and questions, and the program teaches you to verify everything it says.
A credential someone can actually check.
Every badge and micro-credential is issued with a unique serial number and a public verification page. Anyone you send it to, a hiring manager, a client, an auditor, can open that page and confirm what was earned, when, and what it required. Share it to LinkedIn in one click.
What is on the record
The competency, the date, the issuing institution, the rubric the artifact was scored against, and the serial number.
What is not
Your submitted work. Your artifact contains your organization's information and it stays private to you unless you choose to share it.
Who backs it
University of Mary Washington Continuing and Professional Studies. This is a university credential, issued under the university's badge and micro-credential framework.
Two ways in.
Build a credential around your own work
- Start with a single badge and see if it fits
- Self-paced, no live sessions, no fixed start date
- Keep every artifact you produce
- Share verified credentials with your employer or on LinkedIn
Train a group, and see what changed
- A private cohort for your organization, with your own space
- Your policies inside the course. Send us your AI use guidance and it appears in the lessons and in the tutor, so your people get your answer on which tools are approved for which data, not a suggestion to go ask someone
- Choose which micro-credentials your cohort sees
- Group reporting: completion, where people got stuck, and what they produced
- Flat pricing for the group, not per seat
Companies that continue treating AI as a niche technical skill will find themselves competing for talent with organizations that have embedded AI literacy across their entire workforce.
43% of managers feel poorly equipped or not equipped at all to lead AI-fluent employees. Indeed and YouGov, July 2026.
For information about enrolling your team, contact Teresa Segelken, Director, Continuing and Professional Programs, at tsegelke@umw.edu.
The case, in other people’s reporting
Independent coverage of the shift this program teaches. None of it is about this program.
- TIMEAI Alone Won't Take Your Job. Someone Using AI WillRoslansky and Raman, March 2026
- Harvard Business ReviewResearch: AI Is Changing What Employers Want from New HiresDoucette and Gaur, July 2026
- Harvard Business ReviewHelp Employees Get Better, Not Just Faster, with AIDuncan and Anderson, June 2026
- ManpowerGroupGlobal Talent Shortage Reaches Turning Point as AI Skills Claim Top Spot39,063 employers, February 2026
- World Economic Forum3 vital truths about AI literacy that will define the futureAmit Sevak, ETS, October 2025
- FortuneGetting hired in 2026 is all about your microcredentialsEleanor Pringle, December 2025
Reasonable questions.
- Possibly, for the first badge. Take the placement check and you can move to an accelerated path through MC1 that skips the reading and goes straight to the conversation and the artifact. Fair warning from our testing: confident daily users tend to score lowest on the badge about verifying outputs, because they know the workflow and skip the last step.
Start with one badge.
AI Foundations takes about two to four hours. You will finish it with a one-page memo about AI in your own role that you wrote yourself, and a verified credential that says so.