Dear Bob, I am a 29-year-old support analyst (for middleware, DB2 and Lotus Notes Server Administration) working as a contractor. I've started my career working part-time while still taking university Computer Science classes. I've been working here since 1996, and graduated in mid-99. Now, I would like to start the career of Project Manager. I want to take a MBA course to improve my skills. Dear Bob,I am a 29-year-old support analyst (for middleware, DB2 and Lotus Notes Server Administration) working as a contractor. I’ve started my career working part-time while still taking university Computer Science classes. I’ve been working here since 1996, and graduated in mid-99.Now, I would like to start the career of Project Manager. I want to take a MBA course to improve my skills. The MBA course that I have chosen is Management, where I will have classes on Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Fundaments of an Organization (company). You get the picture…a course to help one that wants to become a manager. It has like 300 class-hours. After that, my idea is to take a smaller and cheaper course (I am not rich :), to acquire Project Management skills. This will have like 120 class-hours. Do you think that this is the correct path? Or should I make an MBA of 300 class-hours for Project Management?Thanks for any advice you can give.– Career-bound Dear Bound …To answer your question, I need to make an assumption: That your long-term ambition is executive management. Assuming that’s true, I think the plan you describe is the right one.If your goal was to find a path with a lot of job security and a reasonable amount of upside potential, I’d have recommended the project manager path. No matter what else happens in IT or business, there never will be enough good project managers to handle what businesses need to do, because it isn’t a purely trainable skill. Project management requires book learning, but it also takes “street smarts” and a particular type of personality (a lot of appetite for details, along with a willingness to push people very hard when the situation calls for it). If that’s a fit for you and you’re more interested in pursuing a profession than an executive path, go this way. From your interest in pursuing an MBA I’m guessing you’re shooting higher than that. In that case, go for the more well-rounded understanding of business that the Management track will give you. You can still pick up enough project management training through other means to become good at that. And in the end, a lack of project management MBA credentials won’t create any barrier at all if you’re looking for that kind of position, where the lack of management MBA credentials might get in the way of your pursuit of a management position.– Bob ——– Technology Industry