FIVE QUALITIES OF A PROJECT MANAGER

A course in Project Management can benefit your professional and personal life. No matter which industry you end up in, understanding the basics of project management will always be in demand.
Whether or not you’re actually working in a project manager role, you can gain some invaluable professional skills and life hacks from studying project management. When you master the skills required to get an idea off the ground, life and work become easier. No matter which industry you end up in, understanding the basics of project management will always come in handy.

1. Work smarter, not harder.

You can be busy all day; running a million miles an hour, answering every single email the moment it appears, attending every meeting, and yet making almost no impact on your work. What you need is a working strategy.
Planning, budgeting, developing effective strategies, managing stakeholders, achieving tasks on a deadline, and mastering the efficient management of time are all central to project management.
When you study project management, you learn all the specific techniques, skills, and programs you need to effectively manage your working schedule against a deadline.
When you plan your projects well, you can foresee challenges to manage risks, prioritize accordingly and keep your eyes on the end goal. Instead of spending time staying afloat, you’ll be anticipating and riding the waves like a pro.

2. Improve your chances of achieving the desired result.

Whether you’re setting up a small business, releasing a new product, or implementing a system change within your company, you want to make sure that all your hard work delivers the results you’re hoping for.
Project managers are highly effective at achieving outcomes, because of their unique and specialized training.
A big part of effective project management involves working backward: firstly identifying your goal and what it requires, and then learning how to break down a project into manageable parts on a timeline to reach that goal.
When you study project management, you learn how each project can be broken down into a clear process of assigned tasks, milestones, and deadlines, and how to delegate each component to an assigned task manager to manage stakeholder expectations. This approach allows project managers to react to issues as they come up with greater agility and to direct their teams more effectively to deliver on strategy.
Instead of winging it and hoping for results, your team members will be looking to you for specific advice and direction. You will know exactly what you want to achieve and precisely how to get there.

3. Gain competitive advantage and stand out from the crowd

• Analytical thinking and innovation
• Active learning
• Problem-solving
• Critical thinking
• Leadership and social influence
• Reasoning, problem-solving, and idealization
• Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility

These are all skills that you get to learn and practice when you study to become a project manager. Project management is all about innovation, problem-solving, communication, critical thinking, leadership, idealization of project outcomes, and resilience under pressure.
As part of a typical project management course, you get to practice these skills in group assignments, through work placements, and via industry-led learning focused on real-world problems that need to be solved.
When you can prove to others you are a reliable leader who is skilled in all these in-demand areas, you can expect to be a hot commodity in and out of your organization.

4. Improve the quality of your work.

Project managers don’t just plan, strategize, delegate, and execute tasks to achieve an outcome, they also monitor performance for quality control along the way.
When you study project management, you learn how to develop and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and milestones against your project timeline.
KPIs allow you to measure the progress of each stage of your project as it develops, ensuring you are continuing to work in line with your original goals. This kind of monitoring is essential to ensuring that work is completed at the intended level of quality as well as within the intended time frame.
Project managers also anticipate and respond to issues as they come up, developing solutions along the way and ensuring the final product still meets all parties’ expectations.
Being an effective project manager means being able to come up with innovative new strategies if for whatever reason the project cannot go according to the original plan.
When you understand project management, you will be handing in work that you are proud of, every time.

5. Gain skills in a growing industry.

Project managers are needed across all industries, but they are particularly in the following industry areas:
• Engineering and Construction
• Community Services and Healthcare
• Banking and Financial Services
• Infrastructure
• Manufacturing
• Law
• Information Technology
• Government and Defence
• Education and Training
• Oil and Gas Retail
• Professional services and consulting