Although anyone can register and access OPEN at no cost, we can also provide active mentoring services to individual and organisations.
Whereas passive service models depend on the learner initiating contact with their training provider, our active approach to mentoring demands that our team is regularly reaching out to their learner cohorts to support their development, as well as extending actionable advice on the projects they are working on through the lens of good-practice.
Our mentors can support learners in this way because they are:
- Proven industry experts with a minimum of 10 years’ practical experience in leading complex projects, programs and portfolios of work
- Inspiring communicators, creative and critical thinkers
- Trained educators, facilitators and mentors
Importantly, they are not professional lecturers who have only learned project management from text-books and classrooms – they superimpose on the coursework a wealth of project skill and experience from all stakeholder perspectives to bring project management to life.
Over the course of a six-month mentorship, our team will personally engage (not just bulk email) each learner at least monthly. In the first conversation, learners are subtly risk profiled across a range of factors known to impact program completion, including:
- Enthusiasm for the program
- Prior project management education and experience
- Previous exposure to self-paced learning
- Level of workplace support
- Workload and other time constraints
- Accessibility issues or special learning needs
Learners internally identified as being at risk of successful completion work with their mentor from a toolbox of practical and relevant response strategies, while enjoying a higher level of holistic engagement support.
All learners then progress and are held (realistically) accountable to an agreed learning plan that has specific outputs and outcomes attached, such as Certification.
The one-on-one assignment of mentors to learners also allows a genuine relationship to develop, avoiding a call-center feel to learner engagement. Importantly, contact hours are neither stipulated nor capped, meaning higher risk learners can access appropriate levels of support and self-motivated participants are not held back.
The Institute of Project Management has successfully delivered self-paced learning with active mentor support to a diverse range of global learners in a variety of cultural settings. Our acquittals of government funded contracts in this regard show average completion rates in excess of 80% over the last five years, figures that place us in the top five percent of training providers across all sectors.
Rest assured, too, that your dealings with your Institute mentor remain confidential at all times, as per our privacy policy.