In the third of a new series about taking on new roles we look at how to become a project manager.
The Basics
Here’s a short summary of what a project manager is and does.
A project manager is in charge of making sure a project runs smoothly and is finished on time. They typically manage people, time and money. Project managers are found in almost every sector, from marketing and advertising to IT and construction. They are exceptional organisers and have great communication skills.
Step by step
Taking on any new role can be daunting. Here’s a step-by-step guide for getting started with project management.
1. Consider if you naturally fit the profile of a project manager 2. Research what sector you might like to work in 3. Find out if you need any specific qualifications for your preferred sector 4. Learn more about the skills required for project management 5. Practise your skills on work placements or on small self-initiated projects
Key Skills
Find out what abilities you need to be a project manager.
Organisational skills As a project manager you’re going to be managing a lot of things: time, budgets, expectations, clients, paperwork. You will need to have organisation down to a fine art and thrive on juggling lots of different parts of a project.
Empathy As Elizabeth Harrin a Project Manager in healthcare says ‘being able to relate to people is vital. The workforce is diverse, with multi-generational teams, as well as a wide range of cultures represented in our workplace’. If you’re going to effectively negotiate with people on projects you need to be able to understand things from their perspective.
A cool head In every project things will go wrong. The project manager is the one who needs to stay calm and rational to get things back on track and keep everyone working harmoniously.
Communication skills When projects start to get difficult you’ll need excellent negotiating and communication skills to resolve any conflicts. You’ll need to get your hands dirty – a project manager ‘cannot get stuck in orbit, hovering over the project like an observer and a reporter’ (Effective Agency).
Dos and Don’ts
Discover what to do and what not to do as an aspiring project manager.
Do
✅ Research types of project management (Agile, Kanban) ✅ Try to shadow a project manager to get a sense of the role ✅ Find out what sector you might like to work in
Don’t
❎ Forget that people can make or break a project ❎ Assume it will be easy – projects need constant supervision ❎ Stop learning – there are always ways to improve your skills
Advice from the front line
Hear what advice current project managers have to offer.
Luke, Digital Project Manager at TMW Unlimited, says…
“A successful project manager must have a good working relationship with their immediate project team. They must be approachable, with good communication skills and have the ‘can do’ attitude to tackle any problem head on. If you can be seen to be making a positive, constructive influence on a project, it’s easier for the team to follow suit. Any project, no matter how difficult, will have greater chance of being delivered successfully if the team remain motivated and are all pulling in the same direction.”
Fiona, Project Manager at FutureLearn says…
“I think it’s always wise to not assume. If you assume, you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’! Other tips: always send an introductory email outlining where people can find key documents, what the key milestones are for a project and who’s responsible for what, even if it’s fairly top level. Also, putting stuff in writing and putting people’s names next to things quickly let’s you realise if you got something wrong! Finally, get consensus on your assumptions – silence is not always golden.”
Courses to help you grow your project management skills
Get practical help to become a project manager with courses from top organisations.
Master the basics of project management with these courses:
Teaching is a difficult job which requires a range of skills and extensive knowledge. In the second post about what makes a great teacher, we look at some of the characteristics which make teachers successful in classrooms today.
A great teacher…sets an example
Great teachers are passionate learners who set an example to their students. Whether it’s keeping up-to-date on the latest curriculum information, exploring new educational methods, or developing your subject knowledge, great teachers keep on learning.
Working with a range of abilities in the classroom can be tricky when it comes to assessments. Great teachers set high expectations for all, making sure all students are provided with equal opportunities to learn, develop and succeed. Why not suggest online courses to help your students prepare for exams? Or design assessment instruments to measure student outcomes?
Teaching goes beyond just the classroom: it extends to the world all around us. Great teachers understand that youth social activities can help others and the environment, improve communities and shape character and confidence in young people.
Mental health issues are on the rise in children and teenagers, with 1 in 10 young people now experiencing conditions such as anxiety, depression or conduct disorder (Mental Health Foundation). A great teacher is able to manage their own emotions in the classroom and understand the emotions of others. Learn mindfulness techniques and share them with your students, or find out about psychological therapies such as CBT.
All over the world groups of young people are marginalised from educational opportunities due to poverty, disability and other social issues. Great teachers break down these social barriers in the classroom; tailoring teaching methods to suit a wide range of individual needs and creating a positive learning experience for all.
How do we set about decreasing levels of inequality and creating a world that is fairer for all?
Improving access to healthcare
Across the world people are still suffering from a lack of basic healthcare and healthcare infrastructure. Women and children are especially at risk. According to the UN, ‘almost all maternal deaths occur in low-resource settings and can be prevented’. Finding ways to improve basic levels of healthcare across the globe will save millions of lives.
Education is recognised as a key way to keep people out of poverty, yet as of 2013 59 million school-age children were not in school (UN). Girls especially are not given the same educational opportunities as boys, which can leave them financially dependent on others and unaware of their own rights (Plan UK). We cannot afford to neglect the education of the next generation.
Although crime rates are generally in decline, there is still more to be done to ensure fair, efficient justice systems the world over. The first step to ensuring a fair justice system is understanding it – the law can often be complex and confusing.
Thanks to cheaper air travel, the movement of people across the globe is commonplace. Different cultures, races and languages now live and work side by side in cities the world over. But cultural differences can often bring conflict and confusion, especially if they’re not fully understood. This is why increasing our cultural knowledge and awareness is so vital if we want to live in a globalised and cooperative world.
Codecademy’s very own Nick Duckwiler (left) and Ryan Tuck from Warby Parker (right) in our office. (📷: Mitch Boyer)
Last month, Codecademy and Warby Parker came together to work on a special Learn SQL from Scratch Capstone Project. It was during this time when I met Ryan Tuck, a Data Engineer at Warby, who played a major part in this partnership. So when he decided to drop by our office for the final QA round, I had to break out my notebook and ask some questions. Enjoy.
Hey Ryan, let’s start off with a question I’ve had for a while — what is a Data Engineer? (Is it similar to a Data Analyst or a Software Engineer?)
At Warby Parker, data engineers are responsible for creating and maintaining the plumbing required to support the data and reporting needs of the business. We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.
What languages/frameworks do you use at Warby?
On data engineering, we use Python as our general purpose programming language, as do most of the other teams in our Technology department. When it comes to databases, we use PostgreSQL for the majority of our SQL needs, and are beginning to use Amazon Athena and Google BigQuery for some of our larger datasets. We use Looker as our exclusive business intelligence entry point to all of this data.
What are some of the projects you worked on?
I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of of smart people in every department at our company to help them solve their varied data needs, from reconciling financial data with the Accounting team to automating and modeling standardized performance metrics for our team of over 200 customer experience advisors.
As part of a team of five supporting the data needs of a rapidly growing company, I’ve tried where possible to focus on helping our analysts solve their own problems. This includes helping people learn Python and commit to our codebase, guiding the creation of data models in SQL, and encouraging people to submit pull requests to add features in Looker, our BI tool.
Seeing dozens of otherwise “non-technical” colleagues opening up PRs on a daily basis, and consequently being part of the democratization of tech that we value at Warby Parker, is probably the most rewarding “project” I’ve been a part of.
One project finished recently during our first annual “Hackweek” is called Pipes, which allows anyone at the company to easily move large amounts of data from wherever to wherever (Looker, Google Sheets, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, etc) on a regular cadence, or manually through a simple one-line chatbot interface. The adoption has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re looking to grow this sort of tooling out even more.
“We use software engineering practices to automate the work of data cleaning, normalizing, and model building so that data is always ready to be consumed by data analysts in every department.”
What got you into the data field?
I’ve always been drawn to analytical fields like math, and became pretty proficient in Excel during some internships in college. Once I had learned to program and learned more about data science and its applications in artificial intelligence, I knew that anything I could do to immerse myself in the world of data would be a step in the right direction.
Three and a half years ago, I landed a job as a junior software engineer at Warby Parker not fully knowing what I was in for, but am so glad I got the opportunity to help build tools to support an interesting and ever-changing data-driven culture here.
Where did you learn SQL and Python?
I had a background in C++, and was exposed to Python through an Intro to Data Science course. When Warby Parker hired me onto the Data team in 2015, I had never written a SQL query in my life, but picked it up quickly and within a few months started up internal SQL training classes, which I still teach on a monthly basis.
What does your tattoo say?
The ultimate cheatsheet.
This is Bayes’ Theorem, which is an equation that describes how to update probabilities given new evidence. Two summers ago I worked on building a tool to help predict weekly fantasy football performance. Some colleagues suggested a Bayesian approach would be appropriate, since there aren’t really enough data points in an NFL season to be able to use statistical approaches that require larger datasets, and I’d want to regularly update my predictions after each player’s latest performance.
I did a deep dive into understanding the (simple) math underlying Bayes’ Theorem and came out of that experience with a whole new worldview, understanding my entire knowledge of the world as a big and intricate probabilistic model that I was continuously updating with every experience I ever have. It was pretty transformative, and I figured that was worth a tattoo.
What is a concept in SQL/Python that’s essential to your work?
Donald Knuth said, “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I’ve generally found this to be true, and try to live by it in my work. For example, I’ll generally prefer to keep a data model simple by rebuilding it for all time on a daily basis using a single SQL query instead of making a more complicated model that requires iteratively adding to a table, keeping track of state, updated timestamps, when something last ran, etc.
A wise man once said, “Duplicating data makes things go fast,” but databases are already impressively fast to begin with, without implementing anything to improve performance. Ultimately, I almost always approach a problem thinking about optimizing for my time over machine time, for readability over performance, and for introducing as little cognitive overhead as is required by the problem at hand. Only once performance issues or readability issues present themselves will some code be worth a rewrite.
Last question! Since you wrote Warby Parker’s internal SQL training courses, I know there gotta be some inner Curriculum Developer in you. Can you teach a SQL concept in 2 minutes?
Sure! Have you ever written a query that yields some result set and you think, “I’d love to query the stuff I just produced like it was a table?” Enter the WITH clause.
Suppose I have a mega query that gives the transaction summaries:
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
Using WITH, I can create a temporary table within my query that I can SELECT from and treat it just like a regular old table.
I will put everything from the previous query in a parentheses and use WITH to give it the name transaction_summaries.
Then I’ll apply the date and customer filtering down below for a more readable query, to separate out all the JOIN logic from the actual WHERE filters that I want to apply on that data.
with transaction_summaries as (
select
transactions.date as transaction_date,
sum(items.price) as total_cost,
count(*) as number_of_items
from
transactions
inner join
customers
on
customers.id = transactions.customer_id
inner join
transaction_items
on
transactions.id = transaction_items.transaction_id
inner join
items
on
items.id = transaction_items.item_id
)
select
*
from
transaction_summaries
where
first_name = 'beyonce'
and
transaction_date > '2018–01–01'
order by
total_cost desc
limit
5
If you’re familiar with subqueries, this does a similar thing but makes the SQL far more readable, even if your query isn’t quite as performant as it would have been. This is essentially an implementation of the mantra “Don’t Repeat Yourself” that’s common in the world of programming.
Incredible. And love the SQL styling! 😍
Huge shout out to Ryan and the whole Warby Parker team for making this partnership happen. Special hat tips for behind-the-scenes support from:
A Day in the Life of a Software Engineer (via Life of Luba)
With Airbnb came a revolution of sorts in the world of vacation travel and culture. We sat down with Luba Yudasina, a YouTuber, an opera singer, and a Software Engineer on the Airbnb’s Homes Platform team, to discuss software engineering and her programming journey—from Codecademy to Airbnb!
Hey Luba, let’s start with the basics! What does a Software Engineer on the Platform team do at Airbnb?
Homes Platform’s mission is to create the building blocks to power all Homes categories. Any project undertaken by our team should be reusable and extensible in some way. This means that as a backend engineer, I have a lot of opportunities to work on impactful technical projects that create systems and services to support Homes, as well as collaborate across teams to come up with the best architectural decisions and designs.
Recently, our team wrote a blog post on classifying Room Types into categories using Machine Learning and computer vision. The room-type classification problem largely resembles the ImageNet classification problem, except our team’s model outcomes are customized room-types.
After a few experiments with various models, the team chose ResNet50 due to its good balance between model performance and computation time. To make it compatible with our use case, we added two extra fully connected layers and a Softmax activation in the end.
Let’s rewind a little bit. Coming from a chemical engineering background in college, how did you make the switch into programming?
I went to the University of Waterloo in Canada—a university with the biggest co-op program in the world. Co-op means that to obtain a bachelor’s degree you must complete a certain number of internships. If you are in Engineering at Waterloo, you must complete 5 internships to graduate.
In my first and second years, I interned at chemical engineering companies and afterwards I couldn’t see myself working in the field full-time. That’s why I’m particularly grateful that I studied at Waterloo: if not for co-op, I probably would not have realized I didn’t want to work in chemical engineering until getting a full-time job after graduation.
I happened to have a lot of friends in Computer Science and Software Engineering right when I realized Chem Eng wasn’t for me. They really encouraged me to try coding, and when I decided to follow their lead I never looked back! My first online programming course was Web Development on Codecademy 🙂
“It’s a really cool time to be a software engineer and even cooler to be a female software engineer, because this is the time when women start to embrace their own unique identities and be ok with not being ‘one of the dudes.'” -Luba Yudasina
When I decided I wanted to learn computer science on my own, my goal was to get an internship in the field because working as a software engineer at a tech company would be the best test to really know if it was for me.
I happened to be in Munich, Germany on academic exchange for a whole year when I was learning how to code, so I hustled as much as I could while being there to get experience to learn quicker and have something to put down on my tech resume.
Almost immediately after arriving in Germany, I got a part time job as a developer at a game publishing company. I had a good friend in Computer Science at my German university: her and I ended up working on an Android app as a side project, etc. When I was ready, I started preparing for technical interviews. I then leveraged my network to refer me to companies and do mock technical interviews with me.
Yelp was really random though—a Yelp recruiter looked at my LinkedIn profile and didn’t even message me, but I messaged them anyway asking about internship opportunities, and that’s how I got my interview there!
Airbnb HQ in San Franciso
What is an essential app/item in your day-to-day?
Code searching! A lot of software engineering is problem solving and a lot of it is understanding other people’s code and the reasoning behind writing it a certain way. Searching through the codebases is almost essential to my day to day. Whenever I build something new or build on top of already existing tech, I need to understand how it works and is written, and code search is vital to this.
At Airbnb we use Google’s Codesearch for these purposes, but developers (myself included) also frequently use their IDEs to search for relevant code. I mostly use RubyMine or IntelliJ (depending on the codebase I’m working with).
In your videos, you’ve mentioned the intersection of gender and technology. Can you speak a bit more about that?
It’s a really cool time to be a software engineer and even cooler to be a female software engineer, because this is the time when women start to embrace their own unique identities and be ok with not being “one of the dudes.”
I think it’s particularly important to redefine the stereotypes, and I hope that with my own example I can show young girls and women interested in the field that you don’t have to give up your feminine side to be a software engineer and still be into fashion, or makeup, or art (I personally sing opera) and have other interests outside of coding and be successful in the field.
Before we wrap up, do you have anything else you would like to say to our learners?
Don’t be discouraged, learn and absorb as much as you can! If you don’t understand a concept or can’t build a project right away, know that with practice, perseverance and concentration you will get there!
Take advantage of such amazing tools as Codecademy that are there for you to take and learn. Learning anything new can be frustrating, but knowing that you can do it, staying curious, asking questions and not losing your motivation is the key to success.
Huge shoutout to Luba for this insightful interview. It’s always incredibly moving to see a Codecademy learner go on to do bigger things. Go subscribe to her YouTube channel, Life of Luba.
And thank you to the whole Homes Platform/Engineering team at Airbnb for the support. Check out their wonderful open source projects on airbnb.io.
I remember walking into my first technical interview for a software engineering internship. I didn’t know what to expect, for I did no preparation whatsoever and assumed whatever I learned in class up to that point would carry me through the interview.
Oh, how I was wrong.
I walked into a room containing one other person and a whiteboard. The attention was on me.
The interviewer asked me to write a program that, given a start position and an end position in a matrix (a two-dimensional list or array), would find an optimal path from the start position to the end position.
Not having taken an algorithms course yet, I wrote a program that went through most values in the matrix to find the shortest path.
The red cell is my start point and purple cell is my end point. All the blue cells are cells that I searched to find the purple point. (Source: Elvin Davis)
The interviewer then asked me how I would optimize the program.
I stood there dumbfounded.
Not knowing how to solve the problem at hand, I asked the interviewer for a hint (totally ok to do this if you are ever stuck in a technical interview!). But even with the hint, I was confused. I failed the technical interview and didn’t get the job.
Although the interview was demoralizing, I felt that with the right preparation I could go back and tackle the challenge. The following semester, I signed up for a data structures and algorithms course.
After taking the course, I reflected back on that first technical interview. I realized that with the use of an A* algorithm, that question wasn’t hard at all! I could have optimized my move at every cell in the matrix to find the shortest path. Not knowing those data structures and algorithms cost me a job.
With the optimized algorithm, the red cell is my start point and purple cell is my end point. All the other colored cells are cells I searched. As you can see, I searched a lot fewer cells than my first implementation with this optimized algorithm. (Source: Elvin Davis)
Not only did the course give me a better grasp of programming fundamentals, but it also made me think of the world differently. All of a sudden, I started modeling and navigating the world through an algorithmic lens.
I would represent my walk to class as a graph of vertices and edges and use the A* search algorithm to figure an optimal path. I would use binary search to search through the library bookshelves until I found the book I wanted, as opposed to looking through the books one by one.
An interactive applet I built that teaches the principles of binary search. (Source)
Furthermore, knowing these data structures and algorithms also helped me build some cool stuff on my own! I built an application similar to Google Maps that would route the shortest distance to my classes. I also helped build a code style analyzer that uses a clustering algorithm to automatically provide hints and improve people’s code! The possibilities were truly endless.
Learning how to apply data structures and algorithms not only provided me with the necessary knowledge to start a career in software engineering, but it also instilled a confidence in me to reach out again and try to conquer technical interviews.
The year following the course, I once again began applying for software engineering internship positions. I made it through to some technical interviews and began applying what I learned in class to the problems they gave me.
I was asked variations of traversing graphs, sorting through lists, searching through datasets, and more. I was able to show off my ability to think optimally, and this algorithmic thought process landed me a couple of jobs, including one at Codecademy.
These courses teach the underlying principles of strong programming fundamentals, so you can apply them in your own job searches and careers. I hope you take the courses, and I am excited to see where your learning journey will take you.
Have you ever tried mindfulness or meditation, practices that focus on the present moment and being aware of your thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations? If so, what was it like for you? If not, does it sound like something you’d like to try?
Do you think that such practices have a place in schools? Why or why not?
Students in England already learn about mathematics, science and history, but hundreds of schools are preparing to expand the traditional curriculum with a new subject: mindfulness.
In up to 370 English schools, students will start to practice mindfulness as part of a study to improve youth mental health, the British government said on Monday.
They will work with mental health experts to learn relaxation techniques, breathing exercises and other methods to “help them regulate their emotions,” the government said in a news release announcing the program.
The goal of the program is to study which approaches work best for young people in a world of rapid change. The government said the study, which will run until 2021, is one of the largest of its kind in the world.
“As a society, we are much more open about our mental health than ever before, but the modern world has brought new pressures for children,” Damian Hinds, the British education secretary, said in a statement.
“Children will start to be introduced gradually to issues around mental health, well-being and happiness right from the start of primary school,” he added.
The article continues:
“Every day our front-line services see children and teenagers struggling to get to grips with how they fit into the increasingly complex modern world — contending with things like intense pressure at school, bullying or problems at home, all while being bombarded by social media,” he said in a statement on Monday.
He added: “Services like these can lessen the anxiety, pain and anguish that some teens go through, but also reduce their need for intensive support further down the line.”
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
— Do you think every school should teach mindfulness? Should the practice become a core part of the curriculum, like math, science, language arts and social studies? Why or why not?
— If your school offered a course on mindfulness, mental health or well-being, would you take it? If so, how do you think it would improve your life? If not, why not?
— How comfortable do you feel talking about mental health? Do you feel that there is a stigma against mental health problems in your school or society at large? What role do you think schools could play in helping to lessen that stigma?
— One criticism of the plan outlined in the article is that it doesn’t do enough to prevent the stressors that students encounter in everyday life, like high-pressure exams and social media. What are the major stressors in your life? Do you think your school could do anything to prevent them? If so, what?
— What other issues might there be with teaching mindfulness in schools? Over all, do you think the potential benefits of such a program outweigh the pitfalls? Why or why not?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
What is a year? Why is it important to know when a year begins or ends? How would you explain the concept of a year to, say, a 5-year-old?
Now try to name as many holidays as you can that are fixed, or celebrated on the same day every year. Then try to name as many as you can that move around for any reason.
1. When is Lunar New Year? In which countries is it most commonly observed?
2. Why are calendars “ultimately a social contract, regardless of how scientifically accurate or sophisticated a calendar is,” according to Kevin Birth, an anthropology professor at Queens College?
3. What are some of the ways that calendars reflect the people and cultures that created them?
4. What is a solar year? What are the benefits and drawbacks of using a solar calendar? What is a lunisolar calendar?
5. When and how did the Gregorian calendar become the global standard?
6. The article concludes:
A Hijri calendar from the Gregorian year 2014 hangs in Dr. Birth’s office. On it, Christmas falls on 3 Rabi al-Awwal, the third day of the third month.
He loves the reminder that “holidays you think are stationary actually move, and those you think move are actually stationary.” It shows “how cultural these things are, rather than natural,” he said.
What does Dr. Birth’s statement mean? What information in this article supports his assertion?
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
— What did you learn from the article? Did anything surprise or intrigue you? Did the article change how you view calendars? Did it spur any memories of your own experiences with calendars?
— The author writes: “Each calendar reveals something about how the people who created it relate to the world around them while also preserving rich cultural identities and memories.” After reading the article, which calendar system do you prefer and why? Do you, your family or your community use any calendar besides the Gregorian calendar? If so, how does it express cultural identity or memories for you?
Do you prefer to stay up late after everyone else has gone to sleep, or wake up early with the sun? What time of day are you most alert, clever, inspired and creative? What do you like to spend your best hours doing?
Do you feel as if society is built to accommodate your sleep cycle? Or are you perpetually sleepy from not getting enough shut-eye? If you could build your own schedule, what time would you prefer to wake up and go to bed and why?
Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to find out why people are either late or early risers.
Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan.
In this post discover the amazing places you could travel to with courses that you can get started on now.
This August why not get away? All you need is a computer, tablet or mobile and FutureLearn. We’ve got courses to take you on all sorts of adventures, from Early Modern Scotland all the way to Mars, plus a few other special destinations:
Travel back and explore Scotland’s past
Have you heard of palaeography? It’s a key tool in the historians toolkit – the study of ancient handwriting. On the Early Modern Scottish Palaeography course from the University of Glasgow you’ll delve in Scotland’s early modern past via the loops and scrawls of its citizen’s handwriting.
If exploring real places isn’t enough you, why not try a fictional one? On the Universidad de Los Andes course Reading Macondo: the Works of Gabriel García Márquez you will explore one of the 20th century’s greatest writers and take a closer look at Macondo, the town he created and filled with characters.
Malay is spoken by over 60 million people worldwide and is one of the official languages of Malaysia and Singapore. On the course Introduction to Malay Language you will learn the basics of the Malay language but also explore fascinating Malay culture.
Richard III made headlines again recently when his skeleton was discovered. But what was he like when he wasn’t under a Leicester car park? And what was life like during his reign? Now’s your chance to find out with the course England in the Time of King Richard III from the University of Leicester.
Maybe you feel like Earth is a hard place to live on right now – why not consider a trip to Mars? On the course How to Survive on Mars by Monash University, you’ll find out the basic science needed to make a home on the red planet.
