About Us
Project Road Training helped folks advance in their careers by providing project management training. We focused on teaching CAPM® and PMP® Exam Prep, while making the material feel practical and relevant to applications in the real world.
What makes us unique?
The positive side of us being a small company was that you knew exactly who your instructor would be. This is valuable because the capability of the instructor will absolutely make or break the course experience. Our students were always happy with their course experience. Many positive course reviews can be found here.
For an overview of what our training materials used to look like, see this brief video
Our founder and chief instructor: Bill Baxter
Bill is a certified project manager (PMP) and CSM with an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA in Finance from Columbia University. He worked in the aerospace defense industry for nine years, doing stress and vibration analysis of flight-weight hardware at Pratt & Whitney; General Dynamics; Hughes Aircraft Space & Communications; Bell Helicopter. After business school, he worked in the IT industry: Product marketing at Anixter; Sales Engineering at MCI; Engineering Design as Telecommunications Practice Lead at OWP/P (an A&E firm now part of Cannon Design); and Data Center Strategic Planning at UBS AG. Project management was an overlay skill that Bill applied in many of his different roles.
Bill created and maintained the PMP and CAPM exam prep course content and delivered the classroom courses. He also hosted CAPM and PMP study group sessions in San Diego in partnership with the San Diego Chapter of PMI.
Thomas Carlson
Thomas is a certified Project Manager (PMP), a registered Professional Engineer (PE), and an honor graduate from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering.
During his 35 years of experience, he has held various roles in project management, design, construction, manufacturing, maintenance, and facility management. Thomas has experience in a variety of industries including oil, petrochemical, medical device and food.
Thomas collaborated with Bill in developing our project management fundamentals course. We can deliver this course on site, customized to the needs of client staff.
Thomas and Bill first met through their mutual interest in helping Veterans and volunteering with Black Diamond Charities.
Antuanet Sanchez
Antuanet is a certified project manager (PMP) with a Masters Degree in Integrated Marketing Communications from Roosevelt University. During her 18 years of experience, she has held roles in Fortune 500 companies in the telecommunications, manufacturing and airline industries.
Antuanet represents Project Road Training by conducting weekly in-person project management study group sessions in the Chicagoland area, continuing from 8 years of tradition that Bill maintained up through July 2019.
Paul Jones
Paul is a United States Marine veteran with a Masters in project management and an MBA from Keller Graduate School of Management, where he earned Dean’s list and Honors. He works as an analyst with the veterans administration, and is working towards becoming a project manager within the government sector.
Paul managed the ‘1776 Campaign’ for Project Road Training, verifying Veteran status and eligibility for the Veteran discount and tracking applicants within the campaign.
Agile Project Management
We are fascinated with the promise of 'Agile' and of 'Lean Startup' and continue to study these concepts and techniques. Bill has been on a quest for the past several years to identify the elements of 'Agile' that can and should be embraced within 'traditional' or 'classical' project management. We were way ahead of the curve when PMI embraced 'Agile' within the 6th edition of The PMBOK® Guide. This enabled us to address 'Agile' competently in our updated course materials, as we aligned them to the 6th edition of The PMBOK® Guide. At the same time we are dismayed by the simplistic hype that is so common in discussions about ‘Agile’ these days.
Veteran Assistance
We enjoy working with US Military Veterans and are actively involved with Black Diamond Charities (BDC).
Bill volunteers as a mentor for Veterans who are interested in project management and in getting their PMP certification through several other channels — volunteering as a Military Liaison with the San Diego Chapter of PMI; a LinkedIn group called Veteran Mentor Network; and Veteran networking groups in San Diego County including MEA and NAVNET. Through this activity Bill increases his understanding of the challenges Veterans face during their transition from the Military, which enables him to help them more effectively.
We do not seek or accept job placement referral fees.
We are not a staffing firm.
Our business is training our students. We want to help them advance in their careers.
We want to maintain transparency and avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. Students can be sure we put their interest first — that we are not trying to make a buck off of placing them with one employer over another.
Recruiters can be sure that when we recommend a student, it is because we believe in that student.
Employers can be sure that we will not direct a student or former student to another employer in the quest for referral fees. We have never accepted referral fees, and we never will.
Sometimes it pays to paint bright lines and stay within them.
History of How Our Course Materials Were Developed
Bill has been teaching PMP Exam Prep in the form of a weekly study group since 2011. The result of conducting all these study groups is that Bill obtained a whole lot of deep practice working with students over long periods of time — months instead of just four or five days of class.
Through this deep practice and rich feedback, Bill gradually developed a PMP Exam Prep course from the bottom-up. He started with schedule network diagrams and earned value management — two areas where almost everyone needs a boost up the learning curve. He refined these modules as he searched for ever more effective ways to get the concepts across to students.
Gradually Bill added additional course material, always aiming for the next most-important concept that needed to be conveyed. With weekly feedback from study group sessions, he refined the flow of how the class sessions were conducted. Lecture was added before practice questions, to prime students to handle the practice questions better. The sequence of practice questions was refined, and eventually all the practice questions were replaced with new ones written by Bill to better reinforce important concepts and surface certain material that was not included in the lecture because it could be taught better through example.
No Forced Marches Here
Bill then instructed over a dozen 4-day boot camp classroom sessions for another company, where he was permitted to use his own course materials. Glowing feedback from students provided Bill with additional confirmation that the course he'd created was valuable and even energizing -- where so many 4-day boot camp classes can feel like a forced march into an energy-sapping stream from a fire hose.
Result: students who have previously taken other courses tell us that our lectures were very unique and particularly helpful.
Relevance in the Real World
During class, the moment a student gets the feeling that the endeavor is only about getting the PMP certification, the whole endeavor begins to feel like a pointless waste of time and energy. Bill realized that students need a sense of purpose — a belief that the PMI framework for project management can indeed help them in their work. So, while Bill has been focused like a laser on helping students prepare for the PMP exam, he realized that he needed to constantly strive for a resonance with work in the real world. Through the design of practice questions, and through what was said in lectures and discussion — drawing clear parallels to the work environments faced by the students, this become a key strategy to maximize relevance. This is critical to maximizing student engagement and learning during class, and to motivation during subsequent study.