Archive for May, 2011

Sixty five percent of the population consists of visual learners, so why are you still giving lectures in front of a blank screen? I’m not advocating that you run out and start hammering out graphs for every meeting you’re involved in, but think about it, when you walk in to a room and there is a speaker present in front of a screen what’s the first thing you look at? I’m willing to bet the first thing you look at is whatever image or graph is behind the speaker. Use this to your advantage. Next time you want to speak in front of a crowd or assign work to your team do so in front of (or next to) supplementary materials.

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Let’s face it most of us would rather throw darts at balloons for answers than grab a pencil, dust off a calculator, or open up a spreadsheet and begin looking for solutions through calculations. But ask any experienced project manager and they’ll tell you that math can be a saving grace in nearly every situation. When you can take the step from assigning tasks to your co-workers based off of rough estimates and predictions (seriously to the outside world it seems like your assigning work based off of a ball and a roulette wheel) and start assigning tasks based off of calculated hours available/hours per task, you will begin to see immediate results in both the outcome of your project and the overall respect level of those you are working with. Continue Reading →

When reading over a potential hire’s resume it is vital that you avoid the mistake of overvaluing experience and undervaluing work ethic and determination. Nearly every resume I have come across has been tailored specifically to the position I was looking to fill. This gave me a great idea of what skills the person thought made them the best candidate for the job, but it often undermined the question I was really looking to have answered: Are you a hard worker? This is a lesson that nearly every company looking to bring in new employees often has to learn the hard way.

As an interviewer it is easy to become infatuated with a candidates GPA and credentials, this can be especially true when looking to hire someone who is either still in college or just graduated. Look beyond the internship or part time job they had as their Dad’s golfing buddy’s assistant and see if they’ve held a job where they had set hours and collected a structured pay check (basically ask if they have had a job where they could actually be fired). As a project manager if I had my choice I would pick a team of hardworking individuals over a team of people selected based solely on their puffed up resume’s any day of the week.