Advanced Project Management Certificate Program

The Caltech Advanced Project Management (APM) certificate program provides your experienced project managers and teams advanced topics and readily applicable tools and mindsets to manage complex projects and drive results. Your employees can select from various electives to design a program for their individual needs. As a custom program, your organization can also choose to emphasize thematic tracks, such as delivery excellence, communications leadership, or organizational change. We tailor the module content, cases, and examples for your specific industry and context. Delivery options are flexible to suit your location or specific project-based learning requirements.

Participants who complete at least six courses receive a Caltech certificate in Advanced Project Management. This program meets the educational requirements for the various Project Management Institute (PMI®) certifications.

5 Themes and 23 Optional Course Modules 

Choose from over 20 available options for Advanced Project Management. If you don't see what you need, let us know. We can design a bespoke solution. 

Mastering Complexity & Risk

Leading Effective Complex Projects

This course examines the principles of effective leadership and presents practical methods for decision-making, conflict management, communications, and team development. The focus is on identifying and enhancing your personal skill set.

Managing Global Projects

Projects are far more global today than they have ever been, spanning multiple countries and cultures. This course provides principles for managing projects in a global environment, including understanding the business practices of other cultures, communication across multiple time zones, managing globally-distributed work, and maintaining accountability for deadlines and deliverables.

Effectively Managing Risk in Projects

Learn practical, industry-proven techniques for identifying, assessing, prioritizing, mitigating, and reporting on project risk and potential opportunities. This course prepares you for the PMI Risk Management Professional (RMP)® certification exam.

Project Rescue and Recovery

Projects fail due to a variety of reasons  - changing market conditions, reduced budgets and staff levels, high turnover, un-insightful metrics, etc. The course will help you recognize the signs of impending project failure, and take effective actions to resolve problems, re-plan, and re-negotiate stakeholder expectations.

Fostering Productive and Courageous Project Cultures

Beyond the day-to-day office politics, project teams experience the dynamic tension from goals and expectations on behaviors and execution. Poor policy and unproductive interactions can lead to low morale or bigger mission misses. In this workshop, you will learn tactics for building trust, giving candid feedback, learning to listen, taking risks, being able to admit mistakes, and learning how to learn from each other. We will explore how incentives can lead to unintended consequences, as well as how to design project environments that execute with courage.

Applied Agile & Lean

Agile Techniques Adoption Lab

A hands-on workshop that shows you how to incorporate agile techniques for planning and managing projects. Covers the five proven industry-practices that can be used on any project – product vision, product roadmap, planning poker, sprint execution, and retrospectives. This course prepares you for the PMI Agile Certified Professional (ACP)® certification exam.

Network Excellence: Managing Agile Supplier Performance

This course focuses on strategies and techniques using agile principles to managing project suppliers and supply chains, including general procurement, subcontracts, and vendors. You will examine the entire acquisition lifecycle, from development of executable requirements, specifications, statements of work and contractual terms and conditions through successful delivery and acceptance. You will learn to provide effective oversight and recognize and resolve supplier performance problems.

Leading SAFE: Scaling Agile in the Enterprise

The Scaled Agile Framework (or SAFe) is a set of guidelines for aligning Agile development throughout an organization. This certification course shows you how to successfully scale Agile principles across your organization by utilizing Lean thinking practices and Product Development Flow techniques.

Fix My Project: Lean Project Life Cycles

This intensive and hands‐on course introduces lean principles and their application as project management tools for eliminating waste and enhancing value. The methods described in this course enable dramatic improvements in project completion times while maintaining effective control over budget, resources, risk, and value. You will be able to identify value and waste in project activities, use lean flow and pull techniques to improve process cycle times, and implement lean thinking methods for continuous improvement throughout the project life cycle.

Dealing With Project Change

Project change is inevitable, be it changes in requirements, resources, schedule, or personnel. This course provides effective, proven techniques for dealing with project change. We discuss how to scope and evaluate the proposed value of the change, determine areas of the project impacted, and identifies costs and possible risks.

Strategy & Change

Leading Organizational Change

The success of any organization is reliant upon how leaders respond to the inevitability of change. Change management requires a multitude of skillsets: anticipating an organizational need, creating a vision, enabling, managing and sustaining the change.  This course enables participants to increase personal competence by allowing them to evaluate their own personal leadership styles and how they react to times of change. It also will enhance their abilities to identify organizational needs and translate them into impactful results, while identifying and implementing strategies to overcome pockets of organizational resistance.

Leading Corporate Strategy Projects

You as the project manager are in charge of an important aspect of your company’s strategic execution. Your project matters to the future of your company. In this course, you will learn about corporate strategy, business architecture, developing initiatives, selecting projects to enact these initiatives. As part of this course, you will perform group exercises that will enable you to understand why your project is strategic to your company by going through strategic planning, business design, initiative identification and projects that will support the initiatives. You will gain an understanding of why there is often chaos around projects, what is driving project sponsors, the market changes that may affect direction for projects and what you can do to be more strategic in your approach to your projects and help your organization succeed.

Managing New Product Development

A high percentage of new product failures results from an inability to manage the uncertainty associated with conceiving, designing, and developing innovative products. This course will discuss tools and methods designed for the product development environment, including concept exploration, business case identification, customer needs analysis, and requirements development. Modern techniques such as agile development, lean thinking, and rapid prototyping are presented.

Leading Scenario Envisioning / Strategy Under Uncertainty

Project managers tasked with leading an organization through planning for distant futures (10-30+ years forward) can struggle with the ambiguity and high-uncertainty entailed in such projects. Future thinking or scenario envisioning is a creative and logical approach to understanding critical uncertainties, so that leadership teams can develop playbooks for directing their organization through plausible futures. You will learn how to evaluate critical uncertainties, construct narratives of alternate futures, identify implications, and develop actionable plans and strategies.

Managing Business Transformation Projects

Project managers coordinate and give oversight to the efforts of marketing groups, project teams, product delivery, maintenance and support, operations and staff from various functional groups, including suppliers, business partners, and other external bodies. This course provides tools and methods for ensuring that proposed business transformations are realized through the delivery of complex products and processes.

Communications & Leadership

Managing Without Authority

Learn to positively influence people at all levels in the organization. This hands-on workshop will increase your competence in the areas of communication, influence, and people problem-solving. The focus is on real-life challenges participants experience in the workplace.

Teamwork: The Key to Project Success

Effective teamwork is the key to project success, but many managers don’t understand the principles behind enhancing synergy and establishing an effective team environment. This workshop presents proven techniques for communication, motivation, conflict management, and team problem-solving.

Critical Communications in Projects: Storytelling & Presenting

In this workshop, you will learn techniques for motivating and persuading your professional colleagues and customers in presentations and status reports. The course emphasizes extensive practice exercises for overcoming anxiety, defining message content, controlling your voice and physical presence, and energizing your presentations.

Critical Communications in Projects: Effective Writing

This workshop will help you to write clearly and concisely, and to develop the skills for offering a constructive critique about materials written by others. We provide specific techniques for improving your letters, reports, memos, emails, proposals, manuals, procedures, and other communications through structure, word choice, tone, and style.

Predictability and Flexibility: Juggling Multiple Projects & Expectations

This course demonstrates proven methodologies and techniques for successfully managing concurrent projects. Learn how to navigate complexity, eliminate bureaucracy, avoid over-committing, and set expectations in different role and scope situations. Focus on communicating with multiple supervisors and stakeholders with differing priorities, as well as your own teams and delegates.

Project Leadership

Program and Portfolio Management

Program and portfolio management addresses the efficient coordination and management of multiple related. Participants will learn how to manage competing priorities address cross-project dependencies and risks. This course prepares you for both the PMI Program Management Professional (PgMP)® Portfolio Management Professional (PfMP)® certification exams.

Building Business Analysis Acumen for Project Managers

This course covers the fundamental aspects of requirements definition, process or impact analysis, shaping project outputs and driving intended business outcomes. This course prepares you for the PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PBA)® certification exam. This course is ideal for general PMs who need to have a proficient grasp of a specific business process or area.

Starting a Project Management Office (PMO)

Realizing business value from programs and projects entails creating, sharing, and applying a wide range of knowledge that may (or may not) be explicit in program artifacts (e.g., plans, schedules, budgets, requirements documents, deliverables, lessons learned). Many leading organizations create a Project Management Office (PMP) to address this problem. This course will explore the critical relationships among ideation, governance, strategy, culture, and structure, and provide proven PMO guidelines, infrastructures, and success factors.
Scheduling for Project Managers Using Microsoft Project
Learn techniques for developing and maintaining project schedules using Microsoft Project. This course prepares you for the PMI Scheduling Professional (SP)® certification exam.