Today, employees with project management skills are in great demand. Fortune magazine has identified project management as "the career path of choice."

The Graduate Certificate in Project Management program is designed to meet the needs of project leaders and managers from the private and public sectors. It consists of 7 self-paced online academic courses that are designed for students who want to improve their project management knowledge and skills but do not have time to attend a full degree program. Participants attend regular degree courses.

This program is designed for students who have at least a bachelor's degree and requires formal admission into UMT.

The program was developed by a faculty team under the leadership of Dr. J. Davidson Frame, a world-renowned project management expert. For two decades, Dr. Frame and fellow UMT instructors have educated more than 30,000 managers in this area.

Courses include:

Mgt 201. Communication and Soft Skills. Communications model: sender, receiver, encoding, decoding, feedback, the medium, the message. Barriers to communications. Verbal vs. nonverbal communications. Formal vs. informal communications. Writing reports. Making presentations. Conducting meetings. Practical exercises in effective communication. Dealing effectively with colleagues, supervisors, team members, and customers.

Mgt 250. Project Management. The central role of project management today. A review of the project life-cycle. Techniques in the areas of cost management, scheduling, and resource allocation. Identifying and managing project requirements. A look at project management software.

Mgt 251. Planning and Control. An in-depth examination of scheduling and cost management issues. Work breakdown structure construction. Scheduling with PERT/CPM, Gantt charts, milestone charts. Parametric and bottom-up cost estimation. Use of the S- curve for cost control. Life-cycle cost estimating. Integrated cost/ schedule control using the earned value technique.

Mgt 252. Project Finance and Budgeting. Projects as businesses and project managers as CEOs. Finance and investment tools for selecting projects. Developing charts of accounts for organizing financial data. Using financial metrics to improve project decision making. Creating, implementing, and monitoring project budgets. Capital budgeting techniques. Real option approach to making go/no go decisions on projects.

Mgt 253. Risk and Quality Management. Risk identification, risk impact analysis, risk response planning. Mitigating risk. Risk management techniques, such as Monte Carlo simulation. Defining quality. Total quality management (TQM). Quality control. The ISO 9000 perspective on quality.

Mgt 254. Contracts and Procurement. Pre-award and post-award phases. Contracting modalities: firm fixed-price, cost plus, cost plus fixed fee, cost plus award fee, cost plus incentive fee, time and materials. The bid process. RFPs, RFQs, and IFBs. The statement of work (SOW). Resolving disputes.

Mgt 279. Management of Major Programs. An overview of tools, processes, and regulations governing the management of large complex programs: the program life-cycle, establishing and running a program office, contracting and procurement issues, regulations on large systems acquisitions, implementing earned value management, coordinating work efforts among subcontractors, the link between the budget cycle and the program cycle, managing a project portfolio.