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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  

I have mentioned before that I spend some time teaching, so I have a vested interest in the subject of this article. But I was discussing with a fellow instructor recently how many people seemed to feel that they reached a point in their careers where their training was complete. I really don’t get that at all, and in this article I want to explore the need for continuously improving your skills and the various options available today that will allow that to happen within the confines of our busy careers and lives.

Refresh, renew and grow
These are the three areas where I feel that there is a need to focus on ongoing learning, so let’s take them one at a time.

Refresh refers to the need to maintain a certain standard of skills. We learn a core set of project management skills as part of our training, and some of those skills are practiced on an almost daily basis. On the other hand, some skills are only used in certain specialized situations, and we cannot expect to remain skilled in those areas without a refresher. Consider earned value management as an example--most of us have undertaken some training on EVM in the past, but for most of us we don’t use it every day. I know that whenever I am asked to work on a project that is using EVM, I will go back and refresh my knowledge and skills on the calculations and formulas--I don’t need to …

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