If you have someone in your network who has just been promoted from a technical role to a responsibility of project and team management, the following post might be helpful. 📤 Do not hesitate to share :)
The following lines are inspired from real situations and real sessions between Skills4Dev and its clients (Warning: names are not the real ones).
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STARTING POINT. Teresa recently had the opportunity to take on a new mission within her organization. She is now coordinating the implementation of an important project with significant expected results. She has been an excellent technical staff so far and this is the reason she got this recognition and promotion. Apart from a 3-day workshop in RBM and some experience with project implementation, she had limited real experience with the whole project cycle, including project design, monitoring and reporting.
THE Skills4Dev APPROACH ⏬
This is pretty common situation in organizations: promoting a technical expert to a management position. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, because "the skills that brought you here are not necessarily the skills that will take you there". This is why Skills4Dev regular support was needed during this transition.
👉 IDENTIFYING STRENGTHS AND GAPS
First, Teresa's advisor helped her grow awareness on the skills that brought her here, and the difference with the new skills set that she will need to develop over time. They also used the Skills4Dev's diagnostic tool to identify Teresa's areas of comfort and skills’ gaps. The tool is also an excellent way to monitor our clients’ progress in time.
👉 BUILDING CONFIDENCE
We first focused on consolidating her main strengths, because at Skills4Dev we consider that i) building the next skills' set requires a solid ground of confidence, and ii) you want to put your strengths forward at the beginning. In a second stage, we invested a few session on filling gaps and weaknesses.

👉 ON-THE-JOB PRACTICE
We supported our clients on the job. Little time is spent on theory, most of it on its practical application. For instance, when we had our sessions with Teresa, it was towards the end of the year and she had to prepare the program annual workplan for next year. In the session, we helped Teresa identify the main project’s achievement so far, at output and outcome level, and how she would report them. In-between session, Teresa had to list the deliverables that were still pending by the end of the program. In the following sessions, we focused on a few outputs to practice the skill of developing a logic sequence of activities, as well as a breakdown of responsibilities that would lead her team to deliver during next year.
At Skills4Dev, this is the way we work because we believe that knowledge is acquired through practice, not only theory.
🙌 Do not hesitate to tag someone in your network that could benefit from such an approach 👍
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