The Money Files

I’ve been focusing all month on ways to improve and develop your career as a project manager, and today I wanted to talk about how to expand your knowledge base. Too often, I think project managers get stuck using the same sources time and time again. And we can learn a lot by accessing materials that are available for free, as long as we know where to look. So if you haven’t considered any of these knowledge-sources this year, put some time in your diary to check them out.

YouTube

Not just for funny cat videos! There are lots of quality project management vloggers out there, talking about everything from a day in the life to running projects transparently and reporting back on the results, to PMP® prep videos helping you understand the more complex concepts. 

Subscribe to a few channels and check them out. Look for content producers who have a lot of likes, and who post regularly on the platform, sharing new videos on a regular basis. You don’t have to leave a comment, but you’ll often find that creators will respond to new comments if you post them soon after the video has been shared. If you get alerts from the channel, you’ll get notified when a new video is available and the creator may respond to your comment.

LinkedIn Learning

Similar to YouTube, there are plenty of LinkedIn Learning trainers sharing amazing insights in well-produced training content. Search for the project management topic you are interested in and see what is out there. Your employer might have access to a corporate subscription that you can use. I have access via my university as an alumna.

There are a lot of courses to choose from, so look for topics that are relevant to your current work (or that you would like to learn more about) and providers who have good customer reviews. It feels to me that LinkedIn Learning courses are quality checked, so you should be in good hands whichever one you go for.

Webinars

There are lots of webinars here on projectmanagement.com, taught by experienced trainers and covering a range of cutting edge and established project management ideas. And there are plenty of webinars out there run by other organisations, including PMI Chapters and software companies. Do a search to find out what is coming up in the near future and then regularly make a point of signing up to one webinar a month to expand your horizons.

Podcasts

Podcasts are another way to get real-time, current knowledge and get exposure to people you would never normally get the chance to chat to in real life! Subscribe to a few that sound good and then switch them out if you want a change. There are literally hundreds of relevant podcasts and episodes on all kinds of topics.

Interview-style podcasts are good ones to focus on, and tune into any that promise case studies or sharing research results as these will help you broaden your knowledge and stay current in the market. 

Expanding your knowledge base is a really good way to stay up to date on new methodologies, trends, and technologies which in turn can help you stay competitive. But more than that, it’s a way of helping you stay connected to the profession and continuing to develop your skills so you can add more value to the teams you work with.

Carrying on from my last article about career development opportunities for the coming year, let’s talk about something else you can build into your development plans: enhancing your competencies and key skills.

The first challenge when you come to work on skill development is to work out which ones are worthy of your time. Well, the good news is that many skills overlap. I did a survey recently on important skills for project managers and shared the results on LinkedIn. The comments pointed out that the ‘leadership’ skill was actually a collection of other skills. Other commentators said that it shouldn’t be a skill by itself at all. So truly for project managers, there are so many skills we use every day that it really doesn’t matter which ones you choose to work on. You will get benefit from developing any of them. As long as you aren’t already a super expert in that field with nothing to learn!

Here are some I think that it’s worth leaning into this year.

Problem-solving

Had any problems recently? It seems to be never-ending problems right now, am I right? I don’t know if it’s the time of year or whether it’s simply a sign that work is getting more complex, but there is never a shortage of problems to sort out.

Build your problem solving skills by learning different techniques for group facilitation, conflict resolution, root cause analysis and group decision making. Then you’ll have a toolbox of tactics to draw from whenever you hit a snag in the project.

Prompt engineering

Prompt engineering is the art of being able to ask AI for something and getting back a good quality result. When it comes to generative AI, it’s really important to be able to get the right kind of output, otherwise the exercise is not worth it – the results are too generic.

Use the PMI course in prompt engineering as a starting point and then if you want to take it further look into other resources and courses to help you develop good skills. Be aware that the AI field is developing really quickly so I would tend to rely on training videos, webinars and online materials over books simply due to the pace of change (and I say that as an author myself).

Communication

Communication is an old favourite skill, but it’s certainly one we can all do more to improve. The type of communication we use these days is also different. For example, it’s a lot more online, asynchronous communication, mediated through technology like messaging apps and collaboration tools. Which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it is a skill. And if you want to make yourself understood, then this is where I would be putting my time and effort, especially if you work virtually a lot of the time.

These are just three of the many skills you could focus on this year, and of course you could focus on all of them. If you are serious about professional development, you could choose several, or even one a month to give you a broad boost across many areas. Maybe brainstorm a few topics that you’d like to learn more about this year and plan some time across the months to make sure you have focus development time set aside.

We’re project managers, it shouldn’t be too difficult to block out time in the diary for development! However, I know that real life and projects get in the way, which is all the more reason to block out time now so you have it ready when you need it.