Organizations of all types in every sector are full of accidental project managers—professionals who have been put in charge of an initiative but lack a formal, well-developed set of leadership skills. While they excel at the technical aspects of their jobs, leading a team and managing resources are often new territory.
According to Robert Massoud, MBA, these are the exact types of professionals who often find their way into Bryant University’s Project Management Certificate course.
“We’ve had almost 200 students now,” Massoud says, adding that he’s taught professionals in fields that range from construction to law enforcement. “The majority of the people taking the course are actually doing project management, but without the title or the training.”
Offered online in a self-paced format, this five-week course is built on the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Body of Knowledge. After completing the course, students earn a certificate from Bryant and are qualified to take the test for a professional certification through PMI.
With Massoud at the helm, the course goes far beyond a rigid walk-through of project management theory. It’s a practical and confidence-building experience that can be the first step toward a new stage in a student’s career.
Bringing Real-World Experience Into the Classroom
Before arriving at Bryant University in 2018, Massoud spent years as an operations manager, production services manager, and project management training manager. From 2011 to 2013, he served as the president of PMI’s Rhode Island chapter.
Despite his years of experience, Massoud clearly remembers being unexpectedly thrust into project management.
“I did not take any courses before I started doing project management when I started my career way back when,” he says. “I built the course with the mentality that my students need the skills that I learned over the years right away.”
A Nuanced and Dynamic Curriculum
The project management course’s curriculum covers essentials such as stakeholder identification, risk management, and change management. But in addition to focusing on the concrete skills his students can apply immediately in their jobs, Massoud makes it a point to highlight some of the more personal and internal conflicts new project managers face.
For example, professionals who are new to project management are often quick to change course simply because a more senior co-worker says to do so. Massoud knows this habit well. He made the same mistake early in his career.
“That’s going to blow your project out of the water,” he says. “A good project manager is going to say, ‘Let us look at the big picture. What’s the impact going to be?’ And you never give an immediate answer. You let the person tell you what they want, you analyze it with your team, you figure out the impact, and you go back and talk about what this could mean.”
Preparing students to be able to do that often takes more than just teaching them about effective communication and the stages of the project management process. Massoud makes the training real for students by making it feel personal, even in an online environment.
A Uniquely Experiential Online Project Management Course
Before getting into project management, Massoud was a high school geometry and algebra teacher. Today, he uses experiential teaching methods he learned back then to make his lessons come to life.
“I would try to give them examples that made sense, because I’d get the inevitable, ‘What do I need this for, Mr. Massoud?’” he says. “If you teach someone definitions, concepts, formulas, and so on, a week or two after the course, those are all now on the back burner in their heads. It’s not going to stick.”
With that in mind, Massoud adds real-world examples and case studies to the prerecorded lectures, readings, and short quizzes he employs throughout the project management course. Students also run a simulated project so they can test their new skills. And Massoud makes it all relevant by having one-on-one conversations with every student.
“I ask them to tell me a description of what they’re doing now or a project they’ve just finished,” he says. “I ask them to talk to me about project management without using project management lingo so that it really comes more from the heart. To me, that’s what experiential education is.”
Project Management Skills: A Long-Term Investment
Many students enroll in Bryant University’s Project Management Certificate course to help them in their current roles. But Massoud says the course can be just as indispensable to their long-term career trajectories.
“The biggest reason I say that this certificate is valuable is because project management is rarely a spike and depression kind of a job,” he says. “It’s a steady growth job.” Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) backs up that claim.
Between 2024 and 2034, the BLS expects employment of project management specialists to grow by 6%—double the 3% average growth rate expected for the job market as a whole. The BLS forecasts an average of 78,200 job openings per year for project managers.
“In some cases, organizations literally create a whole project management group, starting with the person who took the course,” Massoud says. “That person ends up leading that group and bringing other people in.”
In that sense, this course can help professionals gain the skills they need to both excel at their current jobs and take their careers in a new, exciting direction later on.
Add Project Management to Your Resume and Skill Set
Completing the Project Management Certificate course at Bryant University enables students to earn a respected and sought-after certification in project management from the Project Management Institute while learning skills they can use immediately and in any sector. According to lecturer Robert Massoud, even the most inexperienced project managers often gain a new sense of confidence from taking the course.
“They want to tell their boss or their boss’s boss, ‘Hey, make me a project manager,’” Massoud says. “This course gives them the background, data, training, and guts to say that. Because now they can say they’ve earned a certificate from a university of high accreditation from a professional project management educator. They now know that they're doing it the right way, and it helps them in their day-to-day work.”
To find out more about the course’s curriculum, its flexible self-paced structure, or how to get started, request more information today.