Why Continuous Learning Is Vital For Better Project Management

Continuous education from birth to death and a career spanning many years in various professional fields is a new reality in the 21st century. Like so many other ideas in human history, the concept of lifelong education for better project management has gone through the stages of birth, rejection, and hype. Here are some reasons why continuous learning is vital to better project management.

Life on average has become much longer, and careers are longer

Today, lifelong education is a conscious everyday life of a modern person and a part of the working process of companies. Project management for decades can hardly be built on the same starting educational baggage and take place on the same professional track.

Forks and possible changes in the professional scenario are tied to different stages of career and age maturity, to personal circumstances. But turns at these forks are impossible without a new formation.

Customisation

For now, lifelong education is still perceived as a superstructure - additional training in the basic one is lacking. But in the new economy, education is fundamentally understood as incomplete. This becomes the primary driver of a career and a prerequisite for multiple professional scenarios throughout life.

This determines the main change in today's time - the request for customization of project management. The set of competencies explicitly required for you is no longer chosen by an educational institution but by everyone for himself.

Learning for a lifetime

Adults learn best through so-called project-problem approaches. In teaching project management, problems are considered and discussed based on new knowledge and previous experience, which in no case should be discarded; it is a reasonable basis for further development.

Are colleges and business schools meeting the demand for continuing education?

Will they be able to respond to employers' need for new staff? Who will teach professions that do not yet exist?

It seems that only adaptive educational models will survive under the new conditions. Competition is growing. The academic market is opening up for beginners who develop new solutions.

Education of the future

Where traditional institutions fail, online education can help: all kinds of online training videos and courses, such as PMP training online, as well as entire online schools and colleges, offer a wide variety of materials with the ability to study at your own pace from anywhere in the world. Some classical institutions also offer distance programs.

However, learning online is probably not a bad idea: the future will likely be a combination of online and offline classes.

The result of the new education today is not the volume of learned and memorized material on project management but the development of cognitive abilities: the ability to analyze, work with information, think critically, solve problems, and implement creative and innovative ideas.

Investing on yourself

Modern education is not a question of a diploma on the wall in an office: "crusts" no longer add relevance to the corporation or the industry. Skills, the ability to develop oneself continuously, and a new, wider circle of contacts - these components together serve as a multiplier for the return on personal investment in one's education. Investing in self-development is a necessity, not an exclusive that some can afford and others cannot.

Final words

Modern education also means inclusion in new professional circles, the development of new contacts, and new social capital - different from the one that a person possessed when he was stewing for a long time in the same professional or industry niche.

The broader and more diverse the social capital and the circle of contacts, the more new opportunities for development open up for a person.

Continuous education in project management and communication in various professional groups enables a person at any career or age stage to expand his horizons, invent and implement a new track, and often find himself.

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