Are You Remaining Current in Your Career Development?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development  

The current project management environment is changing rapidly. That’s hardly news. As a result, PMs need to invest in their personal development in order to remain relevant to the evolving demands of employers. Again, not groundbreaking.

However, for some project managers, this adjustment is becoming a bit of a challenge.

Back when I first started work, the recommendation that I heard was to try and get all of my formal work-related education and training out of the way as early as possible while my brain was still in “learning mode.” The implication being that if you shifted away from the school mindset of studying regularly, then it would be harder to get back into it.

That seemed outdated pretty much immediately. It became obvious to me that I would be sent on training courses—and expected to invest in my own development—for quite some time into my career. It quickly became obvious that there would need to be periods of school-like study (the PMP being an obvious example). But it is fair to say that in those days, the amount of learning, study, training and related activities dropped off as a career progressed. And once a career stabilized, the formal study dropped away.

That didn’t mean that there was no activity; there were still occasional training sessions on a new process or system, there was development associated with …

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