• Professional project management qualifications can be very structured and not replicate real life scenarios.

• Academic qualifications such as degrees and masters are good as knowledge learned can be empirically based but again these don’t replicate real life scenarios.

• The ideal state for a project manager is having a bit of everything, so professional certifications, academic qualifications and real life project management experience.

• Don’t expect what you learn in a textbook to be the same as what happens in client or vendor project delivery, real life project management is fluid, dynamic, fast paced and unpredictable.

• Textbooks cannot teach you common sense and the ability to make the right decision at the right time.

• Rote learning from a textbook is good to memorise certain facts & figures but to succeed as a project manager you have to have the ability of critical thinking and analysis.

• Remember different countries, cultures and organisations are at different stages of project and PMO maturity, textbooks won’t help you with this.

• Whilst all education is important I am a keen advocate of continuous learning, supplement your project experience with further courses and certifications to keep your mind fresh and to stay abreast of topical & recent project innovations and developments.

• Remember every organisation has different structures, resources, knowledge, methodologies, culture, hierarchy & ways of working, textbooks can never replicate this no matter how hard they try.

• Let the qualifications and designations attained get you into a company and started in your project management journey, but do supplement them with genuine experience, nothing is like the feeling of failing and succeeding in projects, one makes you stronger, a great learning experience and hungry to prove yourself and the other is exactly the same 

• Make sure to learn from other project managers and share knowledge, a tacit piece of knowledge one project manager can share with another can be essential in getting projects delivered.

• Remember junior & senior stakeholders in organisations may not possess any project management experience or knowledge so patience is needed in project delivery and experience is the only thing that will give you this.

• Project delivery can involve working with stakeholders whose first language may be different & project managers will need to learn how to interact, interpret and translate all spoken and written words into a universal common and understood language – normally this is English but even then tasks & communication does get lost in transition.

• What textbooks do give you is a knowledge base that you can default to when you want refresh your project management memory or just check an important element of project delivery.

• Once you get the balance of education and experience right the skill and art of project management will flow naturally. Be confident in your ability , don’t be afraid to make mistakes and learn from other project managers and find you own unique way of delivering projects that works for you👍.