Learning for project life
Abstract
Lifelong learning is the mechanism for opening new avenues for project managers to support and foster continuing positive growth within project teams. This is our path to self actualisation.
Project managers play the principal role in fostering ideals for project teams. As directors of professional development and leadership, we must target learning for project life. We are charged with focussing our efforts on becoming lifelong learners [1]. We must aspire to be: more than just knowledgeable; professionals with deep understanding; creative project managers and complex thinkers; dynamic investigators as well as truly successful communicators. Most of all we are called to nurture, in all project managers, the goal of becoming reflective and self directed lifelong learners.
This paper challenges project managers to ask “What does continuous improvement really mean in our lives?” Do we learn lessons from all experiences, mistakes and misadventures? From long before we take our first steps, we are learning from our interactions. Hopefully, we will continue our learning journey until we leave this plane. In professional project life too, we must strive to build a continuous learning path. If project management is about “the projection of ideas and concepts into new endeavours” [2], how is it that we structure our future? What planning processes do we apply to our ongoing learning and development? Project managers continue to embrace new challenges and reap benefit from those experiences but we must do more than this. As lifelong learners, today’s project managers must map out an ongoing edification using the most rewarding approach. We must plan to undertake diverse program activities in differing project roles in order to improve in areas that will extend us in the most meaningful ways. We are required to understand the very nature of holistic learning for life, the different types of learning and what it
means to plan learning that is based on outcomes.
Author
Philip Tighe