Overview and Courses

Earn 36 project management education hours towards your PMP (Project Management Professional) certification and exam when you complete Cornell’s Project Leadership certificate program.

Successful project managers are good at encouraging productivity, overseeing progress, and driving performance among workers. But great project leaders are prepared to go a step beyond, demonstrating emotional intelligence, excelling at communication, building productive relationships and leading high-functioning teams.

This certificate program will prepare you to influence your team to behave fundamentally different than a group of workers, and develop your leadership style to work better in specific project situations. You will learn techniques for fostering healthy conflict and learn how to monitor and control project work by developing stronger bonds among team members.

In addition to the Project Leadership curriculum, you have the option to join an intensive 5-week PMP study group, which includes live online sessions with other students and your instructor, guided practice PMP exams, and preparation strategies designed to help you prepare for the PMP exam. Accompanying study books required.

You now have one year of access to Symposium! These dynamic, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions are designed to foster collaboration and networking with fellow professionals. Led by expert facilitators and occasionally featuring special guests, each multi-day event dives into the most pressing topics in Project Management. You can participate in as many sessions as you like throughout the year. While attendance is encouraged, it's not required.

The courses in this certificate program are required to be completed in the order that they appear.

Leverage Emotional Intelligence for Project Results

Even experienced project leaders will ask themselves “Why won't people listen to me?” or “What went wrong with my plan?” Of all the skills critical to project leadership, emotional intelligence may be the most important—and least understood.

In this course, you will learn to identify, analyze, and manage emotions, both yours and your team members'.

It is a common mistake among project leaders to focus too heavily on the mechanics of project management while neglecting the critical people skills that keep everyone engaged and working harmoniously. In this course, from Robert Newman of Cornell's College of Civil and Environmental Engineering, project leaders will explore concepts of emotional intelligence and practice skills relevant to managing emotions so that they can enjoy better project outcomes. You will focus on five critical aptitudes: communication, relationship management, decision making, conflict management, and motivation.

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Communicate Well to Drive Project Outcomes

Even experienced project leaders often find that regular meetings and status updates don't lead to meaningful communication. When the team doesn't fully understand project goals or how the work is going to get done, that lack of clarity will have a direct impact on whether the project is on time, within budget, and will lead to quality output. At the same time, team members may mislead you about their progress. Stakeholders may not always explain their expectations. Customers may be unclear about what they want and need. What's going wrong? And how can a project leader do better?

In this course, authored by Cornell Instructor Robert Newman, you will examine typical project-related communication problems and explore practical strategies for overcoming them. You'll learn to host kick-offs and lead meetings that actually guide the team toward successful outcomes. You will practice communicating with a fresh, even sometimes unfamiliar, perspective in order to bring about productive and high-functioning working relationships.