The Continuing Education Unit (CEU) Health is the official continuing education programme for the UCT Faculty of Health Sciences. The CEU offers short courses, seminars and workshops primarily for the Continuing Professional Development of healthcare professionals.

The Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme offers short courses, workshops, and conferences. These provide ongoing education for professionals, outside the formal academic courses offered at UCT for degree purposes. Continuing education includes all subjects that may benefit people in their professional and vocational activities.

The d-school Afrika* is Afrika’s first design-led thinking school based within UCT and was founded in 2016. It has over 700 graduates from the Foundation Programme in Design Thinking.

The d-school offers a wide variety of programmes to students, staff and faculty. The school has worked with the university’s Faculties and Departments of Commerce, Education, Engineering and Built Environment, Humanities, Social Sciences, Health Sciences, and Law and Science. These disciplines are essential to the transdisciplinary work that underpins design thinking practice. The d-school has also worked with several other higher education institutions in South Africa and Afrika.

To find out more about the student programmes go here and for staff and faculty go here.

Based in the Faculty of Law, the Judicial Institute for Africa (JIFA) complements the work being done by domestic judicial institutes in Africa where they exist, and offers opportunities for judges from jurisdictions where there are no judicial institutes to participate in courses for professional development. JIFA was established as a project of the Democratic Governance and Rights Unit and offers a range of university-certified short courses to judges, court-based researchers, judicial administrators and others in the justice ecosystem.

UCT offers 20 open online courses hosted on Coursera that are free and that anyone can join. There are no entry requirements, and these are not for university credit. Students can choose to purchase a certificate, and in some cases, financial aid is available. 

UCT’s Summer School, the largest public education programme of its kind in Africa, is dear to the hearts of many alumni. In 2020 it found its natural home in the Development and Alumni Department.

Over 70 years old, Summer School was established to provide education to returning servicemen and women after WWII.  Today it continues to make specialised knowledge accessible to a wide audience, regardless of educational qualifications. Summer School now offers several courses online, so that people from all over the world can experience studying at UCT.

In addition to a traditional Summer School which runs for three weeks in January each year, Summer School offers a Winter School in July as well as year-round webinars, short courses, workshops and lectures. These attract thousands of people with courses on a range of topics from arts, humanities and current issues to the physical and environmental sciences.  

Summer School contributes to the university's social responsiveness by making academic and university resources available to the general public and by providing learning opportunities that do not involve examinations or certification.

The Summer and Winter School programmes, as well as news of webinars and short courses offered throughout the year, are published on the Summer School website.

Based in the Faculty of Humanities, the UCT English Language Centre (ELC) delivers year-round programmes in English as a foreign language to international participants of all ages. Courses are offered at various proficiency levels, including general English, English for business communication and preparation courses for the IELTS (International English Language Testing System), TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language ) and Cambridge English exams. The English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programme helps local and international applicants to UCT who need to improve their level of English before beginning their degree courses.

UCT Graduate School of Business Executive Education courses offer targeted learning interventions that are relevant and responsive to the fast-changing world of work. The courses are ranked 44th and 65th globally and respectively in the Financial Times Executive Education Custom and Open programmes for 2022.

Leading the way in continuing legal education since 1999, UCT Law@work presents a range of seminars and courses dealing with various aspects of the law, including labour, commercial and public law.