Teachable Moments: Labels and Stereotypes

Dr. Steve Eidson, PMP currently is the Associate Dean for Academics with the Center for Business Solutions at Albany Technical College, Albany Georgia. Prior to this appointment he was an instructor for 11 years teaching in the Business Logistics and Operations Management field. He holds a Master Certificate in Six Sigma from Villanova University, is a certified PMP by the Project Management Institute, and also a Certified Economic Developer Trainer from the Technical College System of Georgia. His doctorate is in the field of Conflict Management.

  Lessons Learned  

Teachable moments are formed when you have done something--regardless of the outcome--and learned from the experience. Learning makes us better at what we do and provides a great opportunity to develop others and sharpen skills. We’ve compiled our best Teachable Moments from our community members for you to learn from and share with other project managers.

My teachable moment came at the beginning of fall semester in 2012 while in the midst of taking care of the challenges of loading new classes into online course shells, monitoring enrollment for our division and working with individual students to facilitate their registration process. This three -week period each semester is always fast paced and stress is the norm.

A young lady in her mid-20s, a first-time student at our school, had just brought her information to me to complete the registration process for her. We discussed the number of classes she wanted to take, how many hours would be involved and what she could expect from the online environment which is our program. She was very excited--even exuberant--at the possibilities that she saw in our program, Logistics, for her future capability of providing for her family as a single parent.

She closed out this encounter with a request to use our computer lab to do her work as her computer was not operational. I asked her when she would like to use the…

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