Career Development > Diversity Recruitment

The success or failure of your employee referral program is driven by the perceptions of current and former employees and their ability to articulate unique reasons why anyone should want to join your organization. When it comes to diversity recruitment, this becomes particularly problematic. Read why.

Project management is becoming recognized on an international scale. In support of this, there are a number of efforts underway to promote a global view of how we think about, discuss and practice project management. But to what extent is project management a universal language? To what extent can it be? Or are we all simply sowing confusion as we use the same words to mean very different things?

Employers often look only at their own industry when hiring, because not every PM can make the jump--and if they can’t, things can get very bad very quickly. So what should employers look for--and by extension, what should PMs demonstrate that they are capable of doing? Does industry matter in your career? How transferable is the project management skill set?

Providing work samples is a long-standing practice in creative industries like advertising and journalism, but it's on the rise in other industries. What do you do when an interviewer asks for work samples?

Leadership gaps arise as projects trend toward higher complexity. It will take some significant new skills to succeed in complex near-future projects. When you succeed with the workforce, however, much of the complexity evaporates.

The creators of a new company have to be able to do almost everything--managing a startup requires a diversity of skills, many of which may seem like common-sense acts of necessity.

Many PMOs are struggling to survive the cost-cutting knife, facing staff reductions and increased workloads. It is during these periods of adversity that PMO leaders must take steps to discard the PMO’s image as a cost center and recast itself into a profit center.

One employer estimates that a top worker generates as much as 200 times the value of an average-performing worker.

Based on current trends, project managers will see an increase in the need for them to have more experiential training in real-life situations in order to stay competitive. To maintain a professional edge, PMs will need to set goals to gain significant knowledge through work scenarios and industry learning.

A new survey by IIBA and Forrester provides information about business analysts, including backgrounds, skills, responsibilities and aspirations.

Here are four recommendations for maximizing performance and innovation by creating conditions in which diverse team members can work “at the edge” of their capabilities.

When customized to the analyst, risk analysis can be watchful of ways to not only control risks, but provide details on cost and resource efficiencies for each risk reduction strategy. To begin with, you need to know just what threats could await you.

Does your team have the right personality mix? A formal assessment might prevent a meltdown

Landing that first ‘proper’ position in project management can be a challenge, especially when many of today’s openings require certification and experience, even for the most junior roles. If you’re an aspiring project manager, here are ways you can maximize your chances for that first break.

The move to mobility is on a significant rise. This new breed of independent worker helps open the gates to a workforce that can operate with confidence remotely--and not be wholly dependent upon organization talent to get them started and maintain their operations.

Establishing strategies with a sponsored project management office dedicated to overseeing their implementation within an organization can generate a stronger, more refined and professional business environment that is reliable and dependable--and thus more attractive to customers.

Having the ability to connect to systems with round-the-clock availability has led us down a path of high expectations and preconceived outcomes. These challenges exist for any organization that chooses to make some portion of its operation available to customers at all times, causing some resources and personnel to get stretched in all directions.

It's not just musical tastes and style of dress that separate the generations, in the workplace, you may find that differences in work ethics, communication styles, values and a number of other issues fall along generational lines. Here are some suggestions to help you bridge the generation gaps.

Looking for an exciting IT project management career opportunity? You may find it far away from where you were expecting.

Globally dispersed teams and stakeholders present daunting challenges to project, program and portfolio leaders. It is imperative that organizations develop a formal communication strategy that addresses distance, language, culture and access to information. In this undertaking, “the cloud” is a friend.

To achieve business leadership, we need to have competitive advantage direction from people dedicated to the principles of cost leadership. While it may not get quite the hype that cost reduction efforts do at an organization, it has the potential to meet crucial company goals.

As a leader in the project, you must realize that to leverage the diversity in your various teams, stakeholders and clients, you must tailor your communication methods to each group to be effective.

Is there any advantage to using Cloud-based project management tools to manage projects? Is it cheaper and more effective? Are the tools more feature-rich? And what about the disadvantages? Here is what some research has revealed…

Resource management is indispensable to professional service firms, yet most consulting firms are only able to plan their resources three months ahead and many feel they do not have all the information or formal systems to manage resources effectively, according to a new survey. Here are 10 best practices for effective resource management.

An IT organization is much the same as a football team, and it needs to have similar experience and depth when it experiences attrition. So how do you go about figuring out where your organization stands in terms of its experience and depth?

There is an ebb and flow to market and product cycles. Having inadequate staff for the demands of your organization, however, means you must make adjustments elsewhere to help take the heat off of personnel.

Is trying to find a job getting you down? Knowing what you don’t want can go a long way in your search.

The PMBOK Guide and other best-practice frameworks provide considerable detail on schedule, budget and risk management techniques, but much less guidance on how to manage the people-related challenges that threaten the execution of these plans, and are the most commonly cited reasons for the failure of complex change initiatives.

Your job is too complex for a traditional job description. The same is probably true for those who work with you. Here's an idea: Get rid of the job descriptions and focus on role definitions to maximize performance.

Almost a quarter of CIOs say IT staff need to improve project management abilities.

There is no such thing as a perfect methodology. Each has advantages and disadvantages. Each has situations they handle well and situations where their use will spell disaster. Unfortunately, most organizations choose simplicity over common sense. A better way begins with some questions.

Workforce metrics are not project oriented. So what exactly should you do in your project to maximize workforce value? Maximize the return to project manager (RPM), of course!

Whatever the marketplace realities, your chances of making a sound beginning are a lot better with a big company.

What you don't know about your own biases can land you in court. Even your best intentions can be rewarded with paralyzing workforce suspicion. Maybe ignorance is not bliss after all.

Self-organizing teams are a key Agile principle. Indeed, employing the collective wisdom of a team is a great way to organize around any project work, and encourages ownership. But self-organizing teams shouldn’t be randomly assembled. In part three of our series on structuring and managing Scrum-based teams, here are some factors to consider when selecting or influencing who is on the team.

Some experts think that there are no strong positive or negative effects of gender or racial diversity on business performance. Is achieving diversity in the workforce a waste of time and money?

Managing projects that span countries and cultures brings with it its own set of challenges, not the least of which is a greater risk of failure. This article explores some of those challenges and complexities that are unique or amplified when managing global projects.

Assembly-line procedures have vastly improved the efficiency of explicit work, but they tangle the machinery when applied to implicit work. Managers and knowledge workers don’t punch a time clock because their work value is not productively measured by the hour. So why are projects? And what are the realistic alternatives?

What is workforce management? How is it better than just keeping tabs on all your employees? Part two of this two-part article will explain the advantages and benefits of workforce management. Also included are ways to maximize the workforce management and technical suggestions.

Presented as an Information Systems Track at PMI«2000 in Houston in September.

Here's a simple, effective way to establish guiding principles of project team behavior.

Diverse, distributed teams add risk and complexity to projects. Here are five tips — culled from a new report by Forrester Research senior analyst Mary Gerush — to help project managers bridge cultural, geographic and organizational gaps among team members.

Project work is implicit. We build relationships, contribute intangibles and collaborate on several simultaneous tasks with people who have diverse work styles. These activities aren’t countable, yet we try to measure them as if we were laying bricks and monitoring machines. What percent complete is your project? To answer honestly requires deeper considerations and interpretations than any spreadsheet can perform.

Solid references are as important to job seekers as a well-constructed resume and finely honed interview skills, which is why we’re going to run through the ABCs of job references--why they’re important, and how to get them.

Denying the voice of stakeholders, particularly at the beginning of the requirements process, poses considerable risk by creating situations where great product and service releases are marred by the redevelopment, correction and upgrade processes that follow.

For many of us in the project management field, there is something glamorous about working in a foreign country. But the expat lifestyle isn’t for everyone, and non-native project managers face a host of obvious and unexpected challenges. Here is some first-hand advice for seeking and securing an international post.

Bringing together business functions creates a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. That's what synergy is all about, and here's how PSA can help you get there.

Whether you are the department head or a human resources manager, this is the time of year you are going to get a good grip on what you'll to need in the coming year as far as headcount in your workforce. Now is the time to plan your objectives, which are going to include building a budget and a strategy assessment around those plans. Well, what are you waiting for? Let's get you started!

We've already convinced you that job descriptions are less than ideal. Here is a detailed look at how and why role descriptions are worth the effort.

This article looks at how Lord Beaverbrook and his leadership style made an immediate impact at the Ministry of Aircraft Production as we look at the “Fighter” supply chain.