Tips and Advice from Australia's leading Business Experts

Adeline Teoh is the editor and publisher of Project Manager, an online resource dedicated to providing project management professionals with the latest industry news, information, tools, and blogs, on how to start, manage and close a project.

Adeline has more than a decade of publishing experience in the fields of business and education, and has specialised in writing about project management since 2007. She is the former editor of the bi-monthly print magazine of the Australian Institute of Project Management.

I have a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Media and Cultural Studies, which pretty much turned me into a feature writer. It's hard to obtain a job as a feature writer straight off the bat, though, so I was an editorial assistant first. I eventually progressed through the ranks and ended up editing business and project management magazines, and now online resource projectmanager.com.au.

It isn't really an industry but a discipline within every other industry so it's not hard to 'get into': a lot of people still do their first project by accident. Having said that, a lot of sectors now realise the importance of good project management so there's now a push to make sure people have the right skills. If you want to be a project manager, start by being a project team member, or take on small projects first and build your skills both formally, via training, and through experience.

For several years there was a tendency for project teams to be comprised of a group of generalists but now there's a greater call to include project specialists like schedulers and risk managers, for example. The demand for agile practitioners and project managers who understand change management will also increase in the coming years.

1. Stakeholder management
2. Sound decision-making skills
3. Resilience

Lifelong learning. Learn from your mistakes, learn from your successes, learn from other people, and learn new skills when you can.

Even if you don't become a career project manager, being able to 'speak' project management is always handy as more and more work is becoming projectised.