Project YOU brings together professionals with different experiences and perspectives to help attendees think intentionally about their careers, strengthen how they lead, expand their influence, and prepare for what comes next.
Project YOU is pleased to welcome Matt Quick of PMI Global as the opening keynote speaker for the October 15 Professional Growth Summit.
Matt will help open the Project YOU experience and welcome attendees to an afternoon focused on professional growth, career development, and meaningful connection.
Additional keynote details and the final session title will be announced as they are confirmed.
View the Project YOU ScheduleProject YOU is built around a Professional Growth Framework that guides the overall experience. This year’s breakout speaker lineup brings each of the four pillars to life through a different professional-growth conversation.
The Project YOU focus remains: Design Your Future. Develop Your Strengths. Deliver Your Potential.
Tap the framework image to open and enlarge it.
Four speakers. Four different perspectives. Each session is designed to give attendees practical ideas, real-world insights, and actions they can apply to their own professional growth.
Two breakout time blocks. Two choices in each block. Choose the conversations that best support where you are—and where you want to go next.
Careers rarely follow a straight line—and Zanorfa Lynch’s career across marketing, government and public service, strategic initiatives, and higher education demonstrates how a nontraditional path can become a professional advantage.
Through personal storytelling, audience reflection, and practical career-planning strategies, Zanorfa will help attendees recognize the transferable skills, relationships, projects, and stretch opportunities that can move with them across industries and career stages. She will also explore how professionals can lead through influence and collaboration without formal authority and reframe career changes as strengths rather than detours.
- Identify transferable skills that can create value across roles, industries, and career stages.
- Recognize how projects, special initiatives, and stretch opportunities can accelerate professional growth.
- Strengthen your ability to lead through influence, relationships, and collaboration.
- Begin viewing your career as an evolving portfolio of experiences, relationships, and skills—not simply a series of job titles.
Project professionals are trained to identify and manage risk. Russ Parker challenges attendees to turn that same thinking inward and consider what happens when one of the biggest risks to their professional growth is their own leadership development.
Russ reframes leadership development as a risk individuals can actively manage rather than something they must wait for an organization to provide. His approach combines familiar risk responses—Avoid, Transfer, Mitigate, and Accept—with a personal leadership diagnostic and leadership traits and principles drawn from his Marine Corps experience.
- Apply a project-risk mindset to your own leadership development.
- Identify your biggest personal leadership exposure.
- Examine leadership strengths and gaps using a practical diagnostic approach.
- Leave with one concrete action you can begin using to strengthen how you lead.
Some of the most important decisions happen before the meeting most people think is the meeting.
Kimberly Young’s session grew from an experience in which she entered a meeting expecting most of the major decisions to already be finalized. Instead, she found a whiteboard. The guardrails, technology, and plan were still being shaped—and the questions raised in that room ultimately influenced what leadership decided to do.
Her session explores what causes someone to become “the person to bring in” while scope is still forming, how to contribute once invited into those conversations, and how to build the credibility that leads to earlier involvement over time.
- Understand the behaviors that cause professionals to be invited into important conversations earlier.
- Build credibility so early involvement becomes part of how others experience working with you.
- Contribute effectively when scope, priorities, and solutions are still taking shape.
- Recognize incomplete scope earlier and operate further upstream rather than simply receiving decisions after they are made.
Organizations often begin transformation by asking questions such as: Which platform should we implement? Should we move to the cloud? How should we adopt AI?
Dan challenges leaders to start with a different question:
How do we build a better business?
Drawing on executive leadership experience leading enterprise transformations, Dan will explore why successful transformation begins with leadership, operational discipline, business alignment, and measurable outcomes—not technology itself. He will share five practical principles designed to reduce organizational friction, improve project outcomes, and keep transformation focused on producing real enterprise value.
- Reframe transformation around business outcomes rather than technology implementation.
- Understand how leadership and operational discipline influence transformation success.
- Reduce organizational friction by keeping projects and technology investments aligned to real business needs.
- Apply practical principles whether you lead projects, programs, PMOs, or technology teams.
The October 14 Virtual Experience features a three-person Career Growth Panel, two professional-development sessions, guided networking, and additional opportunities to prepare for what comes next.
Wednesday, October 14, 2026 | 12:00–4:00 PM ET | Microsoft Teams
The moderated conversation will explore career growth, career transitions, transferable skills, adaptability, continuous learning, professional visibility, evolving project roles, and preparing for what comes next—including how AI and other workplace changes are shaping the future of work.
An ICF-certified coach with 25+ years in enterprise-level IT and project management, Shawna empowers project and technology professionals to navigate career transitions, build strategic influence, and lead sustainable change with confidence. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a master’s degree in Information Technology from Florida State University.
Ben Wood, PMP is a Project Consultant and the founder of Praxis Construction Consulting, LLC. A fourth-generation Builder, Journeyman Carpenter, former construction project manager, and systems practitioner and thinker, he brings a perspective shaped by both hands-on field experience and project leadership.
His six years in the trades and ten years managing heavy industrial construction projects shaped his understanding of how knowledge, judgment, and action influence project dynamics. That experience now drives his focus on increasing worker agency, owner satisfaction, and project success.
Ben’s approach incorporates systems thinking, including the Viable System Model and related systems traditions, to help project organizations improve how actionable information moves through the organization, strengthen shared understanding, and increase their capacity for purposeful collective action.
Craig Gonsalves is an enterprise transformation and PMO leader with more than 30 years of experience spanning technology delivery, quality assurance, project management, and enterprise portfolio leadership. He has built and scaled PMOs, led multimillion-dollar initiative portfolios, and helped organizations strengthen how they prioritize, govern, and deliver strategic initiatives.
His career has crossed Lottery Technology, FinTech, Digital Marketing, and EdTech, giving him a broad perspective on navigating change and building transferable skills across industries.
Born and raised in Trinidad & Tobago, Craig began his career as a Computer Operator with GTECH in 1994 and progressed through increasingly complex technology and leadership roles, shaping his belief that successful careers are built through continuous learning, adaptability, relationships, and a willingness to take on new challenges.
Attendees will also have an opportunity to bring their own career and professional-growth questions into the conversation.
With more than 20 years of experience across disaster recovery, healthcare, government, technology, engineering, and financial services, Tanya Boyd brings a cross-functional perspective shaped by project leadership, communication, collaboration, and organizational alignment. A former President of the PMI Baton Rouge Chapter, she is known for blending practical project management, storytelling, and creative thinking to help audiences see familiar challenges from fresh perspectives.
This session introduces GUMBO, a practical, human-centered framework designed to help project professionals move beyond activity and toward meaningful impact. Built on five essential ingredients—Growth, Uniqueness, Meaningful Outcomes, Belonging, and Ownership—GUMBO connects professional growth, creativity, trust, accountability, and value creation.
Layered with the M.O.R.E. mindset (Manage Perceptions, Own Project Success, Relentlessly Reassess, Expand Perspective), Tanya will explore how project professionals can not only deliver the work, but help stakeholders clearly recognize and experience the value being created.
- Make growth and innovation more visible to stakeholders.
- Shift from delivery-focused thinking toward outcome-driven leadership.
- Strengthen trust, cross-functional alignment, and enterprise awareness.
- Demonstrate ownership behaviors that reinforce stakeholder and executive confidence.
Shaniqua Fields is an Agile Delivery Specialist at RF-SMART with a background in Salesforce project management, CRM implementation, digital transformation, and complex technology initiatives. Her experience spans the full project lifecycle, from discovery and planning through implementation, user acceptance testing, go-live, and post-launch optimization. She is also passionate about mentorship, career growth, and expanding access to opportunities in the technology industry.
Corporate culture often encourages people to “bring their whole selves to work”—but the reality of what feels welcome, expected, or rewarded can be much more complicated. Using the experiences of women in tech as the primary lens, Shaniqua will open a candid conversation about authenticity, workplace expectations, identity, and the hidden effort that can come with navigating professional environments.
While the session centers the experiences of women in technology, the conversation is intentionally broader. Attendees of all backgrounds will be invited to recognize how these dynamics can show up in their own careers, teams, and workplaces—and to consider what it means to create environments where people can contribute, grow, and belong.
- The tension between authenticity and adapting to workplace expectations.
- How identity, belonging, and professional expectations intersect.
- Why these dynamics matter not only to those experiencing them, but also to colleagues and leaders around them.
- Broader insights attendees can carry into their own careers and teams.
Thank you to Ascendo Resources for supporting Project YOU 2026 and helping us create meaningful professional-growth opportunities for the Northeast Florida community.
Join us October 14 virtually and October 15 at UNF for the Project YOU 2026 Professional Growth Summit experience, and build the experience that best supports your career, leadership, and professional growth.
Early Bird pricing has been extended through September 15.
Register for Project YOU 2026
