Who is a Project Coordinator?

A project coordinator is a person, who supports a business through its product initiation down to closure, and hand over of the finished product.

They work, at ensuring the project is completed in time according to an agreed schedule.  

A project coordinator has impeccable people skills and cordial at ensuring everyone is carried along at each stage of the project. Their main role is to coordinate the smooth running of the project environment, especially the internal running of the business project stages.

They stand as the intermediary between project teams and other business department/Projects, ensuring mundane task are completed in time according  specification.

The term Project Coordinator is sometimes interchangeable with either Project Support, Programme support and sometimes PMO. Depending on the organisation and scope of the Project or Programme, businesses tend to use the job title that best reflect what they supposed the role entails according to the profiling of the business and its status.

What qualification should a Project Coordinator possess?

The role any individual plays within any given organisation, could be as a result of work life training or academic gained knowledge.

When it’s a work life training situation; this means the individual might have worked in different other capacity and has built the skills set that allows him/her the capacity to coordinate activities efficiently. Skill set such as; time management, detailed oriented, well organised, good people skills and work effectively under pleasure. All these above skill sets, are easily learnt from roles such as customer service, data analysis, sales and admins roles.

Experience gained from such type roles are able to channel one’s career in the direction of becoming a project Coordinator.

Another scenario or route to becoming a Project Coordinator, would be learning to become a Project coordinator by getting professional training via A levels, degree level or advance level. This are academic taught course,  that allows an individual to gain insight into project  management and at the end of a study period,  a certificate is issued to candidate that successfully completed the course requirements. 

There are different professional bodies such as PMI, APM, Agile etc offering training opportunities to people looking at a career within the project environment. With such training and previous experience in other related field of studies. One can easily practice in capacity as a project coordinator or even as a project manager.

There are universities offering 1year master degree course, this course prepares you for a role within the project environmen. With a years master course, you could choose an aspect of project management to specialize in such as; change management, Risk Management, HR Management etc.

 Inconclusion, regardless of the route to which you choose to become a project coordinator-one thing you need to bare in mind always is, in your role as a project coordinator you need to always put the project goals forefront to all you do.

The success of the project is largely due to your ability to build a professional friendly work culture amongst every aspect of the project for which you are responsible for coordinating.

A Project coordinator is the liaison officer for any given project and as such, you needs to be polite, self-motivated with a can-do attitude. Proactive to achieving your companies project/programme goals.   

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