It’s the best job market news for months we are being told!

According to the Office for National Statistics, the UK has just experienced the biggest quarterly drop in unemployment for 11 years, with the number of people out of work falling quite markedly in the three months to April 2011.
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I have advocated “business led” or “benefits driven” project management since 1997 when the first edition of The Project Workout was published. I argued that a project should only be undertaken if it benefits the organisation. Looking back 14 years, it all seems so obvious.  Why would anyone embark on a project with no benefits?
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Learning about identities
My interest lies in understanding the managers of projects, the nature of their identities. This is an important issue for the profession. Much training is concerned with standards and toolkits, as if project managers can be defined in terms of their familiarity with such artefacts. But the body of knowledge in which embryo managers are tutored tells them nothing of their intended role – the character part they are to play in the drama of organisational life. The person implied by this way of thinking – the master of the project tools, the custodian of the project paperwork, lacking any personal interest or ambition beyond the project – is scarcely human, and not encouraging as a professional model. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems that these days you cannot open a website or newspaper without seeing adevice this or ebusiness that, so it comes as no surprise that the next evolution of the CV has to incorporate techniques to leverage this new and expansive digital media.

In the old days a well laid-out CV that didn’t have any spelling or grammatical errors plus a handful of achievements and a well written cover letter, was all that was needed to secure that vital first interview. Well, that’s no longer the case! Read the rest of this entry »