Do you want to learn about project management? If you do, I remember that feeling too. There was a time when I wanted to go on a project management course more than anything else in my working life.
I also remember thinking, ‘I’ve never done anything like this before. I hope I’ll be able to follow it.’
Is this how you’re feeling? If it is, let me reassure you:
- You aren’t alone in feeling this.
- You are almost certainly wrong.
Just the same as I was wrong…
Despite thinking I didn’t know about project management, I actually knew a lot. What I didn’t know was these three truths about a project management course. So, in this article, I’ll talk you through:
- Project Management: ‘It’s all a Bit Complicated’
- Truth #1: Your Project Management Knowledge
- Truth #2: Why Take a Project Management Course?
- Truth #3: There’s Always More to a Good Project Management Course
- So, You are Ready for Your First Project Management Course…
Before we get into the three truths, then, let’s look at the concern I felt and that you may be feeling…
Project Management: ‘It’s all a Bit Complicated’
You may be keen to learn because you suspect that project management is a great career. And it certainly is. Take a look at our article: Why Project Management? 13 Great Reasons to Go for a PM Career. And, for a more ‘commercially-minded’ approach, we also have: Is Project Management a Good Career? How Well Does it Pay?
But you may also be wondering if it is all a bit too complicated. I certainly thought so at the start of my career!
To start with, there’s a lot of jargon to come to terms with (and you can get our Decode the Jargon of Project Management eBook by clicking here). There are also some complicated-looking charts, and there are systems, processes, and tools to get your head around.
Most people think their project management knowledge looks like a little dot, within a vast pool of unknown knowledge and skills.
Nothing could be further from the truth…
Truth #1: Your Project Management Knowledge
The truth about your project management knowledge is that you already know most of the things you need to know to be a successful project manager. And a well-designed project management course will have the content and a structure that will help you recognize this.
So, let’s update our simple diagram with a more accurate illustration of your project management knowledge.
Project Management Experience
For most of us, it is pretty hard to get past our education and into the start of a job without some experience of projects – even if it is just organizing a party, or your first job search campaign. These are where you started to learn the basic skills of project management, like:
- list-building
- sequencing
- time estimation
- thinking about risk
- buying stuff
- stakeholder engagement…
The list goes on.
In fact, having trained many thousands of Project Managers in live training environments, I have concluded that there is a lot of truth in the quote from Richard Bach:
Learning is finding out what you already know.
Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.
I’ll come back to this later.
Where Do We Acquire Our Project Management Experience?
It’s a question I pose a lot of my training and seminar groups. And the answers I get are pretty consistent:
- We learn by doing: trial and error
- …Indeed, most of us learn more from our mistakes than from our successes
- We get advice from colleagues and people around us
- …And we sometimes just learn from watching what they do
- Some people also like to learn from books, articles, or YouTube videos.
Add to that my assertion that ‘project management is little more than organized common sense’. So, most of us can easily figure it out as we go.
What does this Mean for Project Management Training?
I hope you can see that you already know a lot. More importantly, what does this mean for project management courses?
Put simply, the role of a project management course is to take your experiences and what you have learned from others, and your common sense, and organize them all into a logical structure. A good project management training program will give you three things:
- A robust process framework to apply your knowledge
- Tools, techniques, and methodologies to get results quickly and effectively
- The confidence to apply these in the real world of work
So, teaching is reminding others of what they already know, and helping them to:
- Give it a framework
- Decode the jargon, and
- Put names to concepts
Truth #2: Why Take a Project Management Course?
So you may be wondering:
‘what’s the point of a project management course if I already know it all?’
The purpose of a project management course is to help you connect up all the dots; to make sense of all the different things you do know, and to put it into a framework.
It will also help you feel part of ‘the club’ by knowing the terminology and sharing the language of project management. Not knowing what a term means is not a sign of stupidity – it’s just a lack of knowledge. A good project management course will fill in the gaps as well as connecting the dots.
And, finally, a good project management course will also give you a whole load of tools, techniques, methods, and processes to help you do your job more quickly and reliably.
Moments of Insight
My philosophy on learning and training is simple. A good course will make you think.
It will give you ‘moments of insight’. These are the instants when you suddenly understand something in a new way. This gives you more power to apply your existing knowledge – and maybe new knowledge to take out for a spin. These moments of insight take two forms:
- Distinction Insights
These are moments when you first realize that two or more things, which you thought were the same, are really distinct in some way. Like, for example: - Connection Insights
These are times when you can feel your brain connecting the dots. These connections make your old knowledge more powerful. And they deepen your understanding. The connections can be between:- Something you already knew and understood, and a new piece of knowledge.
- Two things you already knew and understood, but that you did not recognize as connected.
A Single Framework
One of the big benefits of any good project management course is that it puts everything into the same consistent framework. Unlike picking up your project management skills from a patchwork of downloaded articles, blogs, and YouTube videos, you’ll get a consistent approach. The language will all match up, and the approaches within the course will mesh together neatly. There will be none of that: ‘is this referring to the same thing as that?’ confusion.
You can also have a lot of confidence that someone who has put together a coherent project management course knows what they are talking about. It’s not easy to design a full program based on shallow knowledge.
But do also take a look at the experience of the trainer. Ask:
‘have they really done project management or are they just a trainer who has learned the material from other trainers or from books?’
There are:
- Project Management professionals who want to teach what they know, but who have not acquired the skills to train effectively.
- Trainers who have learned enough about Project Management to put together the course they want to run, but who have little depth beyond the course scope.
- Project Managers who have also learned how to train effectively, and have built up solid experience communicating and teaching.
Guess which you should ideally see out! I am straying here into the topic of how to choose a project management course.
Truth #3: There’s Always More to a Good Project Management Course
Another indicator that you are ready for a project management course is simple: do you have a raging thirst to learn?
A good project management course will be both:
- a stand-alone course that gives you the full story, but also
- a course that connects up to others that give you more depth, and related side-stories.
Project Management is a big, sprawling discipline. It does not stand alone as a simple, contained package of knowledge. It interconnects with a near-limitless number of disciplines, like:
- risk management
- management of change
- interpersonal communication
- marketing
- negotiation
- conflict management
- leadership
- personal effectiveness
- staff development: coaching, mentoring, training
- benefits management
- decision-making
- problem-solving
- health & safety
- team-building
- …
Need I go on?
If you are looking at some of the other promised courses and thinking ‘oh yeah.., that sounds good...’ Then you know you are ready!
So, You are Ready for Your First Project Management Course…
Why not take a look at some of our courses?
What’s to lose? Just click this link to take a look at our menu of all our courses.
And if you are wondering:
‘Should I go for an online Project Management course, or Live Training…’
Why not check out our feature article: The Definitive Guide to Why a Good Online Project Management Course Beats Live Training.
