Global award for postgrad founder of 'Life is a Project' school

Empathy

And he has now won the 2017 James R. Snyder International Student Paper of the Year Award from the Project Management Institute’s Education Foundation, and had the paper republished in the June edition of PM World.

With a professional background in IT and project management, Neil had worked in 20 countries for various blue chip companies, but when his parents fell seriously ill, he turned to teaching English as a second language.

“Having worked in so many countries myself,” said Neil, “I could put myself in the shoes of many of the people who can be very educated and very articulate in their own language but can feel stupid and isolated because they feel unable to communicate to the level they want to.”

So he put together a plan combining his two areas of expertise: project management and language skills creating a five-week course included a community project for the group to organise and ‘project manage’ from start to finish. For this, Neil was able to link-up with the British Refugee Council which helped the class as it organised a local event to support refugees.

What can achieve? 

Neil explained: “It provides a basic methodology for people – with the starting point of ‘this is what I want to achieve’ and then mapping the stages towards getting there. 

“The idea is to lift them through the ‘U-curve’ of their experience in the UK, when so many people get stuck in a rut and giving them the tools to lift themselves out.

Neil studied distance learning through official University of Salford partner Robert Kennedy College, Zurich, and says he needed to thank the University for “equipping me with the academic, research and writing skills to achieve my goal.”