Deborah Bigelow Crawford, PMP, President

We are excited about the official launch of the Business-Driven PM curriculum! After refining the course contents based on input from students in pilot courses, we are ready to help organizations develop project managers with their fingers on the pulse of business.

The message we are hearing here from attendees at the PMO Symposium in Las Vegas is that the PMO is working well, but there continues to be a skills gap in project management generally.

With budgets tight and a shortage of the right skills, companies are looking within and asking themselves: “Are we helping our people maximize their potential?” And as always, there’s a ferment of interest in methods to help do more with less: thus the drive toward Agile project management.

It’s always a concern to me when I come to the end of a presentation and there are no questions! I wonder if I answered every issue … or if  everyone fell asleep! But on Monday, after my presentation on business skills for project managers at the PMI Global Congress in Vancouver, although there were no questions there were plenty of folks lined up to discuss the issue with me. I spoke to 25 or more project management leaders who reconfirmed for me that the topic of training project managers in business skills is a timely one indeed.

Something that has been absorbing a good deal of our thought and energy at PM College the past several months has been discovering what role business acumen plays in project manager success.

You can learn what we've discovered through research and interviews by downloading our free on-demand webinar, "An Organization's Best Competitive Weapon: Business Savvy Project Leaders," which aired on Tuesday, Oct. 16.

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(Note: The questions and answers in this series were generated during our last PM College webinar, viewable here.)

Question No. 3:

What impact are you seeing from the GFC (global financial crisis)  on the investment in Project Management training?   

So many questions arise when an executive or project manager is asked to address training needs. Do your staff or team members need training? And of what kind, exactly? What will is cost … and more important, will it be worth the cost? How much is enough? What’s the best way to train your people?

The whole issue can be mind-boggling. Often, training needs are put aside “until we have time to think more about these issues.” Unfortunately, that time can be hard to come by.

Welcome to the PM College blog! One of the perks of teaching courses in project management is the conversation with project management professionals that arises in and outside of the classroom. Our desire is to extend that conversation to the Web, creating a network of project management professionals at all levels, to discuss those issues that you face each day.

Does project management training REALLY make a difference? I've heard both positive and negative viewpoints on this. Training takes employees off the job, and - quite honestly! - it can be boring! (Not ours, of course … .)