Professional Development

PMO Conference 2022 \\ Professional Development in Your PMO Career – Eileen Roden and Carol Hindley

In this session, Eileen and Carol talk about the professional development available for all levels of PMO practitioners. They’ll be focusing on the four levels of qualifications from the House of PMO, PMO career paths, their own insights in how to develop yourself and your PMO team.
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Career Hour – Networking Externally, Online and Internally

In this Career Hour session we took a look at the subject of networking and how that can affect your career development. We covered the obvious ones of networking at external events and shared some tips on how to get more out of it - or just convince you that it doesn't have to feel like a daunting thing. We also covered online/virtual events and a little on social media based networking. Finally, we took a look at an often overlooked area of networking - and probably the one that has the biggest impact on your career development.
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Everything You Need to Know About the Essentials for PMO Managers Qualification

The House of PMO launched its third qualification - Essentials for PMO Managers - in May 2022. In this session you will gain an understanding of: Why we have created the qualification The background of the qualification Who the qualification is aimed at What the qualification covers What the exam is like How long the training course is The qualification becomes available in the marketplace for learners to book and complete their courses from June 2022.
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Doing a Self-Assessment – Career Hour

Self-assessments are just one of the ways you can do an introspective on yourself - to understand what experiences, skills, knowledge and behaviours you have that make you competent at the role you perform. Once you have that understanding, you can use it to further improve on those areas you're already performing strongly at - and of course, address some of the weaknesses that become apparent. We take a look at self-assessments with the PMO Competency Framework.
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PMO Conference 2021 \\ Improving Parliament’s PMO Capability – Carol Hindley, Catherine Hallett & Gavin Woods

Parliament UK is the centre of government and politics in the UK, and to manage democracy in the UK, they need PMOs to help them manage the portfolio of work. In this session, they share their insights into their experiences of adopting the House of PMO – PMO Competency Framework.
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Active Listening – LAB Profiles

Whilst doing research for this and other blogs I came across a book by Shelle Rose Charvet , entitled “Words that Change Minds”. It is a very comprehensive book on the subject of language and provides further food for thought on how we listen with our brains. Set out below is an extract of a few of the items I think are most relevant to a PMO setting. But I would encourage you to get the book and review it in full to gain the greatest benefit. By way of introduction, the book is all about “LAB Profiles” – related to language and behaviour. And to do it justice the following is a direct quote from the book.
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PMO Career Hour – Cheaper Ways to Learn

In this PMO Career Hour session, we brought together a small group of PMO practitioners who were interested in exploring other ways to develop themselves that doesn't break the bank. We looked at the 70-20-10 model of learning sources - with the large majority of our learning coming from 'on-the-job'. We also looked at cheaper ways to learn about the many different subjects that impact the PMO role but the same challenge always emerges - it's not necessarily about having a budget to take up learning opportunities, the biggest challenge we have is making the time. That's a motivation that has to come from yourself, making learning a habit rather than an afterthought. Take a look at the session recorded after the event (we don't record these career sessions so people feel comfortable talking freely) and the session notes.
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