When people begin looking into project management training, they may quickly find that they have a general understanding of what they will be learning, yet struggle to conceptualize its real application to their career or their institution. If that’s the case for you, it might be time to thank your lucky stars that you’ve never experienced catastrophic failure of a project that your team was working on.

Had you had that experience, you would probably not have too difficult a time imagining how the weak links in your team or its operations could have been identified earlier, before they led to the collapse of the project. That is the essential benefit of project management training. It provides the comprehensive structure and organization that prevents shortfalls and inefficiencies from slipping through the cracks, while also providing you with the tools to fix them.

If you have lacked those tools in the past and suffered the consequences, there’s actually reason for you to be grateful as well. The experience may seem like a black mark on your career, but it presumably serves as a case study in the problems that can be addressed by project management training. In fact, the retelling of your own tale could be the thing that spurs colleagues and friends of yours to pursue the appropriate information technology training. And as you personally advance your project management training, your case studies will make it that much easier for you to envision how your newfound skills could be applied in a crisis situation.

It’s a familiar principle in business, entrepreneurship, and self-help that there is really no such thing as failure. Rather, falling short of expectations only provides you with more clarity about how to get where you want to be. Other project managers will surely tell you that early failures can be beneficial if they function as learning experiences and prompt you to expand upon that learning with project management training, such that the same mistakes will never be repeated again.

Although four years old now, this article at Tech Republic is a useful example of the advantage that can be obtained by learning from the failure of an information technology project. The author, Andrew Makar, explains how project management training helped him to overcome the lack of structure in his earlier efforts, which had contributed to a lack of clarity about individual tasks and a relative inability to identify when something had gone wrong and to rectify the situation afterward.

Project management training helps a team leader to understand how to schedule tasks and properly delegate responsibilities, and it encourages the sort of communication that prevents anyone from pleading ignorance when they fall short of what the team expects of them. It also provides the entire team with the hierarchy and clarity of mission that should let them recognize problems as they emerge, and raise them to the team leader before they turn into catastrophic failure of the entire project.

If you’ve seen these problems firsthand or you can envision them clearly, then you are well on your way to understanding not just the general content of project management training but its practical applications. But if your professional experience has been more limited than that, look to someone who has failed and overcome it. They can help you understand that in absence of project management training, you may not be as organized or well-equipped as you think you are at the outset of a project.