Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Project Management as a Career Step
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.
The project management profession is not new. It has been a mainstream profession across virtually all industries for decades now, and yet project managers continue to be created part way through their careers. When functional managers have career discussions with business analysts, testers, developers, etc., they will often hear that the staff member wants to get into project management, but rarely do you find an undergraduate who wants to be a PM when he or she enters the workforce.
This is logical: Successful project managers have an understanding of their environment that you can't get except through experience. Anyone can be taught the basic skills that a PM needs, but project management is more than a collection of tools and techniques. It is an art, not a science, and in order to put their own style into their management a PM needs a certain degree of organizational and emotional maturity as well as superior soft skills.
This is recognized throughout the world, across multiple industries--people need to evolve into project management. Why then is it that so many organizations think that the evolution stops with project managers, that the career stops there? While it is good for the ego to think of the PM as the top of the food chain, it is clearly not the case. So why do organizations not continue down the path that they have started?
From project management …
Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.
ADVERTISEMENTS
|
"Love your enemy--it will scare the hell out of them." - Mark Twain |