Sharpening your Skills

Written by Francisco Matos – Director Broward Programs- & Sean T. Kenny – Director Palm Beach Programs  

You may find that sharpening your skills may be cost prohibiting and difficult to schedule due to work competing priorities, budget cuts, career transitions, and/or lay off events. However, make no mistake that owning your employability requires you to “re-tool” and acquired skills and knowledge by leveraging your South Florida PMI Chapter sponsored education, guest speakers, collaboration and knowledge base tools listed below.

No longer should we expect our managers to direct our careers, but for us own our employability identifying core competencies gaps and professional development gap we must address. This is more important now during economic downturns, where employers expect more skills, experience and knowledge. Thus, we assembled below some positioning and list of tools available to you at no charge. All PMI professionals should develop networking skills and understand expected networking etiquettes to develop a professional support structure in support of their careers. Here are some skills and tools suggestions:

Networking Skills: Develop a 30-60 seconds infomercial/elevator pitch highlighting your strength, accomplishments and your career area of interest. If you are in career transition, ask for advice and referrals to help you land the right job. Networking and referrals is proven to be one of the most effective career search tools.

Project Management Core Competencies: Most organizations are looking to develop both Project managers’ technical and soft skills. Thus, here is a high level summary of those technical and soft skills we identified to be relevant in today’s market:

Technical skills: Project Integration Management, Project Scope Management, Project Time Management, Project Cost Management, Project Quality Management, Project Human Resource Management, Project Communications Management, Project  Risk Management, Project Procurement Management

Soft –Interpersonal- Skills:  Problem Solving, Leading, Influencing, Negotiating and Communicating

Below are some tools to help you get access to training, knowledge and sharpening your skills:
Project Management - PMBOK      http://www.pmbokguidedigital.com/pmbokguide/fourthedition/
Project Management Institute (PMI)        http://www.pmi.org/Pages/default.aspx
South Florida Chapter - PMI      http://www.southfloridapmi.org/
Online Encyclopedia     http://www.wikipedia.org/
Tool Website     http://www.projectsatwork.com
LinkedIn       http://www.linkedin.com
Twitter      http://www.twitter.com

Blogs: These are used by project managers practitioners given their perspective (e.g. Management consulting, PPM, Solution Delivery, etc...)  This will help you keep you up to date.

Automated Alerts - If you are not taking advantage of the free Google Alerts service, you are missing out!  Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

RSS Feed Reader – Feed Readers constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content. Whether a site updates daily or monthly, you can be sure that you won't miss a thing.   You can simplify your reading experience as the feed reader shows you all of your favorite sites in one convenient place. It's like a personalized inbox for the entire web.  Discover new content - Millions of sites publish feeds with their latest updates, and our integrated feed search makes it easy to find new content that interests you.                                               

We own our employability and sharpening our skills at all times. During business downturns expect to see your company shift directions away from products and services that are not producing expected results. Monitor these trends within your company, industry and regions. Sharpen your skills leveraging internal and external training, and use of the South Florida PMI Chapter’s cost effective and sometimes frees core competency development training to create new opportunities for you. Consider taking additional responsibilities and assignments to develop new skills, and take advantage of the above listed free tools to increase your knowledge and exposure.

Additionally, get involved with your South Florida PMI Chapter, participate in PMI monthly tools sessions (free) at each of the dinner meetings across the three counties. Sharpen your skills and own your employability to contribute to your companies and our local economy growth.