Some pretty big news over here this weekend: the APM is now free. No strings attached: anyone can enroll into the Aspiring Project Manager, my signature offering supporting Higher Ed & Student Affairs professionals learn more about project management, for free. Yay!
There are a couple answers to “why”, here, but they all really boil down to one big idea. I’ve done a lot of reflection and at my core I’m just not comfortable taking money to enroll people who are often underpaid (or unemployed) into a program that I genuinely believe can change their careers, or even lives. Life-changing information should be free. That’s why I started this platform in the first place.
I’ve always given discounts to un/deremployed folks, but given everything we know about how often qualified folks don’t complete applications unless they’re 100% sure they qualify, I figured that it’s very likely that there are many folks who don’t ask. And why should the onus be on them to be asking in the first place? Institutional problems require institutional solutions. CMLLC is a very small institution but we’re now a small institution with a solution in place to an institutional problem.
It took me a long time to name Caroline Manages LLC. For a while I was tossing around the name “Projects Are For Everyone”, which is a name I didn’t go with because it’s a mouthful and it’s terrible for SEO and about a million other reasons. (It’s a bad name lol.) But what I liked about it was that (at least for me) it’s a reference to my favorite poem on earth: Like You, by Roque Dalton, which has the following middle two lines:
People need both. People need poetry, and people need bread. I don’t have any illusions that an online course (free or not) is going to serve the purpose of putting bread on tables or giving someone the feeling of a really good poem. But the older I get the more I’m internalizing Mother Teresa’s words that as individuals, we can’t do great things: we can do small things with great love.
Maybe the community the APM becomes does great things. Who knows! I certainly hope so. But in the meantime the “small thing with great love” that I can do is to make said community free to anyone who needs it, no matter what.
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