Back to School

September already! Yesterday I saw my first scarlet maple leaf, artistically arranged on top of a daisy, as if to graphically depict the change of seasons. The university and the high school are back in business in my little town (you can't miss the traffic on Main St. ... or the young, invincible drivers).

And, speaking of education, I'm digging deeper into the data we amassed earlier this year in our Value of Project Management study (and missing Jim Pennypacker's astute touch at crunching statistics!) and I keep finding more and more interesting facts, particularly about PM training. (If you've already downloaded the Research Summary, come back in a couple weeks and redownload it: I'll be adding additional observations soon).

The study paid special attention to the value of PM training, asking companies to list the ways they provide training (using internal resources, hiring training firms, through colleges and universities, online, etc.) and how much they spend on it. The stunning fact that surfaced when I began to compare results for the top-performing companies with the low performers (these terms and how we arrive at them are explained in the methodology description in the summary) I found that the top performers spend three times as much on project management training as do the companies at the bottom of the heap.

Back to school, anyone?