Is ex-Apprentice Claire Young the most divisive woman in project management?

She calls herself a project manager and yet has no formal training. She sells a brand of project management that the public recognises but professionals like to shun. James Simons meets ‘The Rottweiler’ who’s tearing up the rulebook.

"Project management is boring.” Claire Young pulls no punches when offering her thoughts on how the profession is perceived in UK schools. “Young people’s lives have changed dramatically: technology, the pace of life, peer pressure and celebrities; you’ve got to find new ways to engage with them.”

The ex-Apprentice star perpetuates a brand – a style – of PM that you’ll either love or hate. She says openly she’s a bit like Marmite and makes no bones about rubbing people up the wrong the way if it means getting the job done.

In her opinion The Apprentice made PM sexy again. It put the profession, or a side of it, in the spotlight and PM was all the better for it. “I call it OTT – Off The Telly, that’s my hook for the students. If I went into a classroom and said, ‘Today we’re going to do project management’, it would be an instant turn off. But if I said it was a day of business and enterprise, that would be exciting.”

With no formal training in project management and a background in the corporate world, Claire has worked tirelessly to boost her learning – and her profile. Since finishing as runner-up in 2008, having never lost a task as PM, she has quickly carved out a reputation as a youth business champion, promoting entrepreneurship and enterprise skills in schools.

“All the work I do is on business and enterprise. Enterprise is a term I like to use because it encompasses doing things in a enterprising way.”

So why is she doing it? Obviously it makes sense financially but the reasons go deeper. Claire has taken it upon herself to up-skill the nation’s youth. She speaks passionately about a lack of core skills, of children leaving school poorly equipped and of employers crying out for a change.

Take risks “Children are told what to think. They arrive from primary school pre-conditioned to a certain way of thinking. They’re told they can’t have those ideas because it’s not in the curriculum."

“We encourage them to take risks. When they work on an enterprise project they have full responsibility for it, when things go right and when they go wrong.”

It seems like the woman nicknamed ‘The Rottweiler’ is on a mission, eager to get her teeth into the current education set-up and those who run it. She tweeted recently about education secretary Michael Gove’s apparent u-turn on enterprise in schools and is by all accounts, not a huge fan of academics ‘who talk a lot’ but deliver very little.

In a word, it’s all about action. Spotting a gap in the market, she has been working with more than 500 UK schools to promote School Speakers – a business start-up with 165 motivational speakers on its books – and has recently been courted by the Project Management Institute to work on its fledgling PM in Schools initiative.

“I would class myself as a project manager,” she says. “From a young age I’ve always been the one in control, always led in any situation. So I understand what it takes to lead and manage.

“If you put a list of enterprise skills and project management skills together they are exactly the same. Planning, organisation, teamwork, working under pressure, etc – they are skills that employers value, and that it is what we teach.”

Listening to Claire describe the ‘ideal’ PM, a familiar picture emerges. A good PM is a team player, is prepared to delegate, understands strengths and weaknesses, works well under pressure, has a sense of humour and a thick skin.

But the ‘thick skin’ is the giveaway. I suspect in Claire’s world a good PM is nobody’s best friend. A good PM is a solution finder; they assimilate, analyse, act decisively, and never, ever let the heart rule the head – “no one die