Simulation-Based Project Manager Training According to Shtub
A pilot is not allowed to fly passengers without hundreds of hours in a simulator. A project manager can be handed responsibility for a multi-million project after a two-day course with slide decks. That contrast is the starting point for Professor Avner Shtub of the Technion technical university in Israel, who has long researched how project management can actually be trained.
In his 2013 article, Shtub argues that Simulation Based Training, often abbreviated SBT, is the next generation of project management education. His work is one of the reasons the phrase "flight simulator for project managers" exists at all.
What does the research say?
Shtub's central point is that project management competence consists of three parts that must be trained together: knowledge content, practical experience, and feedback. Traditional training delivers the content but skips the other two. Real projects provide experience, but the feedback arrives late, is unclear, and mistakes cost for real. Simulation is the form of training that can unite all three: you get to act, see the consequences, and receive feedback, over and over again, without anything breaking.
One concept Shtub highlights is the learning history: the simulator stores your decisions and their consequences over time. That makes something important possible which real projects rarely allow, namely analyzing your decision process and not just the outcome. In a real project, a bad decision can happen to produce a good outcome, and vice versa. With a saved history you can go back and ask: what did I know then, what did I choose, and what did it lead to?
Shtub explicitly compares with flight simulators: pilots do not train in a simulator because it is cheaper than flying, but because the simulator allows repetition of rare and dangerous situations, with a full debrief afterwards. The same logic applies to project management, where the hardest situations, such as conflicts, crises, and tough prioritizations, are precisely rare and expensive to fail in.
What does this mean for you as a project manager?
Separate outcomes from decisions when you evaluate yourself. The project going well does not mean all your decisions were wise, and a struggling project does not mean you did something wrong. Ask yourself: given what I knew at the time, was the decision reasonable? It is the decision process you can improve, not the luck.
Build your own learning history. Keep a simple decision log in your projects: which decision, which assumptions, which outcome. After a few months you have material that reveals your patterns, for example whether you systematically underestimate time requirements or avoid escalating in time.
Practice the rare before it happens. Do not wait for your first real project crisis to start thinking about how you will handle it. Rehearse the scenario in advance, in role play or a simulator, so that the first time does not happen with your real team at stake. Pilots call it building experience before it is needed, and that is exactly the opportunity simulation gives project managers.
How to practice this
Shtub's vision, a flight simulator for project managers where decisions, consequences, and feedback are connected in a saved learning history, is exactly the idea Project-simulator is built on: you practice conversations and decisions against AI counterparts, everything is recorded, and the debrief afterwards is based on what you actually said and chose. If you want to step into the simulator, you can try it free for a week.
In Project-simulator you practice these conversations against an AI counterpart and get feedback grounded in research like this.
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