Professor receives Project Management Institute’s Future 50 honour
Posted on Friday, July 24th, 2020
When Taiwo Abraham joined Algonquin College it was an opportunity to shape the next generation of project management practitioners, bringing his global experience to help change the world for the better.
It’s that sense of purpose and passion that helped Abraham recently be named one of the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) 2020 Future 50 honourees.
“Some time in February the PMI reached out for an interview and sent me some questions. Then a week before the announcement, I got an email from the office of the CEO letting me know this was going to happen and to keep it confidential until it came out,” said Abraham, 37, a Professor in Algonquin’s Project Management program.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria and then with a perfect GPA of 4.0, received his MBA at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Over the last 15 years, he has delivered productivity enhancement projects to customers and stakeholders in both private and public sectors, including the Central Bank of Nigeria and UNESCO.
After completing his MBA he came to Canada, and began looking for a community to call home.
“I did my research on Canada. It came down to Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa, and Ottawa just won. It is a balance of everything I saw in all the other places. Now, three years down the line if I had to choose again, it would still be Ottawa,” he said.
PMI celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019. It operates in nearly every country around the world to advance careers and further the project management profession through globally-recognized standards, academic research, publications and networking opportunities.
The Future 50 award recognizes the “new generation” of project talent rising around the world, but this is not the first time Abraham has been honoured by PMI. In 2019 he was awarded its Young Professional of the Year Award. He received the PMI’s James R. Snyder Award in 2018 for his global research work. PMI would normally honour award recipients at its annual conference, but due to COVID-19, the event is cancelled this year.
His talent did not go unnoticed by Algonquin Program Coordinator, Angela Clermont, who connected with him over LinkedIn with recruitment in mind. She invited him to her office and let him know a role was opening in the faculty.
“I loved the idea. I wanted to help young, aspiring project practitioners through the program. I wanted to be part of the pipeline that produces project managers,” said Abraham, who is now gearing up for the Fall term and hopes to begin work on his PhD in the months ahead.
When asked about the changes to his industry brought about by COVID-19, Abraham said as horrible as the pandemic continues to be, it has prompted some positive changes to how we live.
“People have had to adapt to new ways of doing things. Some of these things the world has long been advocating for… living responsibly, being friendly to the environment,” he said.
“Covid brought a form of equity to the world, because there is something about pain, suffering or a common problem that does unite humanity. In some ways my background from Nigeria also helps that view. We have probably dealt with a lot of problems that are not typical in the developed world.”
When Abraham speaks, you hear hopefulness in his voice, and he sees his role at Algonquin as an avenue to ignite the passions of his students to build a better future.
“We do this day in and day out, batches of students come in and go out, and we get used to it, and we don’t always take the time to reflect on the value society places on the work we do,” he said. “It is very important that we are constantly reminded of how very important our work is. It is through the things we do here that we can easily change the world for better. We are the real change makers.”
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