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Home » Explore by role » Business Roles » Project management is everywhere—but what does it mean?
Project management is everywhere—but what does it mean?
July 24, 2024
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This week we are talking about another highly transferable technical skill: project management.
We talked about project management when we discussed high-income skills, but as the term shows up more frequently during the job search, it’s worth spending a bit more time clarifying what it means. Depending on the context, “project management” can refer to either a career path or a skill set.
As a career path, project management refers to roles that guide projects from their earliest ideation stages through post-execution assessments. Associated job titles are project manager or program manager, with ‘coordinator’ titles typically indicating early-career roles and ‘director’ titles signifying more advanced roles. Another similar role could be product manager.
Naturally, people who work in project management are expected to have strong project management skills. However, this skill set is also highly desired across several career areas, including engineering, IT, business management and operations, human resources, finance, sales, marketing, hospitality, research, and the list goes on.That’s right: project management, as a skill, is highly transferable.
That’s because project management is essentially a package of technical and workplace skills, many of which are in-demand in their own right. Put together, these skills describe someone who is able to start, execute, and complete assignments. Here are some:
Planning
Scheduling
Budgeting
Problem solving
Communication
Collaboration
Adaptability
Risk management
Having strong project management skills means that you are able to use many or all of these skills in concert with one another in order to move a project or a goal forward. To apply these skills to your field, think about the types of projects people in your field work on and what they need in order to succeed.How can you build your project management skills?
You likely already have experience using at least some of these skills in an educational or professional setting. If you’ve ever completed a project, you have project management skills.
To strengthen your overall project management skills, acknowledge your strengths, then focus on enhancing the individual skills that you have less experience with. This way, if you’re discussing a project during an interview and your interviewer asks how you budgeted project funds, rather than just saying you haven’t worked on a project with a budget, you can supplement your answer with the work you’ve done in order to prepare yourself for future projects with budgets.
Here are some courses on Coursera to explore skills that fall under the project management umbrella:
For planning skills, try Google’s Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project or Project Planning: Putting It All Together.
For budgeting and scheduling skills, try University of California Irvine’s Budgeting and Scheduling Projects. If you’d like a more thorough understanding of finances, try University of Illinois’s Financial Management Specialization.
For problem-solving, try University of Michigan’s Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age.
For communication skills, try University of Pennsylvania’s Improving Communication Skills.
For collaboration skills, try Northwestern University’s High Performance Collaboration: Leadership, Teamwork, and Negotiation.
For adaptability skills, try UC Davis’s Adaptability and Resiliency.
Or if you want to build a more cohesive set of skills, try UC Irvine’s Project Management Principles and Practices Specialization or University of Illinois’s Business Value and Project Management Specialization.
Google’s Project Management: Professional Certificate and University of Colorado Boulder’s Project Management Specialization are also great options, however those are more geared toward learners who want to pursue a career in project management.
Finally, if several of these programs sound interesting to you, consider signing up for a Coursera Plus subscription, which gives you unlimited access to over 7,000 courses, projects, and certificate programs.
That’s all for this week. Before you go, tell us in the comments: What big projects are you working on right now?
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