CHAPTER 7

Taking Care of Your Career

I found that most of project managers are evaluated based on job performance. That means, organizations evaluate them on how successful they deliver projects in terms of the iron triangle. I mean everyone in the organization expects the project manager has consistently delivered his or her projects on time, scope, and cost. Yet, this is how we are still being evaluated in terms of how well we can perform as a project manager. But I believe it is not enough to evaluate the performance of project manager.

Many of us get into project management by accident or by job promotion, not by way of design. You may see yourself to end up being a project manager, rather than careful consideration and intentionally pursued. But what is the typical career path for a project manager?

What usually happens in organizations is that a technical specialist is progressing in his or her job and being technically efficient and productive, gaining many good technical skills. As soon as he or she is good doing that, become part of a project team for some time, acquire some leadership skills and are assigned as a junior project manager. But managers are not asking if they like project management or not, if they like dealing with people or not.

If that project manager is successful, he or she will be assigned as a project manager for a more difficult project, so will build more and more skills, then he will be ready for a more complex project.

Breaking the Cycle

Many project managers that I talk to have some project management plan for the projects they are managing (Figure 7.1). Only a few of them, however, would have any idea when I ask them, “Where is the project plan for your career?” As important as the projects that they are executing and managing, their career deserves to be written on paper with some high-level career goals, preferably some strategies or steps to follow to make it to the next level. In my experience, many project managers do not really know what the next level is.

Figure 7.1 Breaking the cycle

They need to break the cycle and plan for his or her professional career. It takes time to reflect upon where you are and where you want to be. Starting with why is a very good start. Ask yourself the question, “Why am I a project manager?” and then ask you the “how” and finally you will obtain the “what’s.”

Plan for Your Career

If a project professional does not plan his or her professional career, no one will (Englund and Bucero 2012). This is my lesson learned over the years. Our career development is a project in itself and we need to take care of it very seriously, if want to progress professionally and personally. Then plan for your career. I will give you some clues about how to do it.

Identify Your Project Management Career Perspectives

Some professionals get lost at some point in their professional careers. Finding some help is needed in order to move forward and look for the right career movement (Figure 7.2).

Start by identifying several project manager career perspectives:

Organizational

In any organization, there are two common threads that tie all the knowledge, processes, methods, tools, and solutions together in terms of how they serve the greater teams of people who go to work daily: ability and influence. Every individual has his specialty and ability to perform his job. Every professional has his circle of influence to affect how can do his job successfully as well as how his colleagues can do theirs. Each one of us must focus our career on how to influence the organization’s ability. Whether positive or negative, an organization is dependent on the collective ability of its professionals to fulfill their responsibilities with competency and professionalism. Anything short of that tall order could mean a negative impact to the organization’s standing in the marketplace and how it is perceived as an employer. Particularly in the area of project management, developing a career path for professional project managers has been somewhat lacking and has not received the attention that is needed.

Figure 7.2 Professional career perspective

More and more project managers are finding that in order to leap across the career chasm, they may have to leave their current organization and get into leadership roles outside the project management realm, taking their collective wisdom and experience right along with them. I classify the employees of every organization in one of three areas: doers, thinkers, and positive infectious.

The doers are the ones who may be less experienced, still learning their jobs and learning why their job is critical to the operations of their department or team. Doers tend to focus on learning and supporting the business and helping to ensure relevance of their craft to the business processes, methods, and tools that are at their disposal. Doers can still have influence. It would be wise for leadership to make themselves available to the doers and gain insight on how their daily battles are won. Doers are the ones in the trenches delivering the results and are able to identify ways to help improve and demonstrate their value.

They need to find ways to connect with leaders of the organization and understand their needs, support their causes, and align their day-today activities to the strategies and goals that have been set at the organizational level. This is also a great way for the doers to give the leadership insight into the value they are delivering for the benefit of the organization. Influence does not flow in one direction. The doers can have just as much impact to the wellbeing of an organization as the decision makers at the top of the food chain.

The thinkers are the keepers of the gate. They are the ones that spend their time enhancing the way things are getting done, how to best implement project management methods and tools, and how to best communicate to the rest of the organization on how to deliver projects successfully. They are the experts who know the ins and outs of all the organizations policies, processes—the “how’s” of doing business. It is also their responsibility to approach the doers for ideas for improvements, enhancements, and identify future capabilities. They are also the ones who will take their time to decide whether an existing process or tool needs to be revamped or replaced by determining if their user base is readily adopting, vociferously rejecting, or finding alternative ways to do better and be better. It is to the thinkers’ advantage to leverage these voices to identify ways to improve how projects are managed and how the organization can support their project managers.

The infectious is responsible for the ideation and proliferation of project management knowledge. The infectious has more experience and awareness of the organization’s project management processes and the inner workings of various project organizations or departments across the organization. Their focus needs to be around maturing the organization—not just the PMO—but the entire organization. They need also focus on helping the doers and thinkers learn and contribute to the organization’s PM capability. Ideas that are formulated by the infectious should be followed up with action plans and strategies to improve or to implement. Knowledge sharing is a must and it must be done readily across the organization.

Finally, the infectious need to encourage and facilitate innovation across the organization. The infectious need also know how to quantify and qualify success and pinpoint how the project management practice is contributing to those do your successes. Each project completed successfully should be leveraged to encourage learning, innovation, and knowledge sharing to maintain success and growth across the organization. Proliferation of the science and art of project management is highly dependent on an organization with a strong infectious group.

Marketplace

We live in a world in which change is inevitable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average tenure of employment around the world has significantly decreased over the past 30 years. This change, however, does not necessarily need to cause any angst among project management professionals but rather an opportunity. This change also gave us a clear indication that our job is no longer about doing our job. If we cannot manage change in our professional career, then we could become extinct because someone else may be trying to get rid of our job from above or take our job from below. We have to be comfortable with change, which means we need to learn to deal with change.

The professional job market has taught us over the years that we are not hired to just occupy a desk or even to just perform a specific function. We are hired to deliver value, to improve our organization, to innovate, to share our knowledge, and to drive the changes that are necessary for the organization to remain competitive in today’s world economy. Project management is the facilitator to making all these things happen and your project management career should be especially change-ready.

The modern job market is also teaching us that you can no longer spend a 45-year career doing one thing. What employers are looking for from perspective employees are no longer just technical skills, traditional business, or scientific acumen, but rather attitudes and willingness to learn and adapt.

The traditional career ladder that may offer fewer job changes, linear promotions, longevity in a single firm, and highly dependent on internal politics is being replaced by a career lattice that can offer many role changes, promotion by transitions (job changes), short sprints, and opportunities that are made available through extensive networking, both inside and outside the organization and sometimes even industry. Jobs are also becoming more nonlinear in that one person is expected to take on multiple roles, wear different hats, and do different things in this age of “do more with less” mentality.

One of the best things you bring to work every day is your attitude. Your attitude is revealed in the marketplace by the relevance of your knowledge and skills, how well you are connected with your network of peers, professional contacts, and leaders within your organization and your industry. Your attitude is also demonstrated through your competence; that is, demonstrating tangible business and operational results that you can point to as your past success. More importantly, you will need to be able to correlate your past successes to future benefit of the organization. And finally, your attitude is reflected by your eminence on your team, in your organization, in the industry, and in the professional community. Are you known in the workplace for your expertise, your professionalism, and your achievement? Are the leaders in your firm referring to you and your success as an asset to the organization? Are you willing and able to share those successes publicly? As a professional, humility is great, but invisibility is not.

Personal

Over the years, the job market has seen huge transformations to what the employers are looking for to how jobs are marketed and filled by HR organizations, staffing firms, and independent recruiters. The following statistics are very telling to how the job market has transformed its business practices as a result of the transition from the “career ladder” to the “career lattice.”

The Résumé

The importance of a well-written résumé is obvious. With the amount of scrutiny that a résumé goes through in a job search process, it certainly deserves our utmost attention. However, most of us have never had any formal training in résumé writing. It is not until recently that colleges and universities began teaching résumé writing as part of a formal curriculum. For most experienced project managers, they historically resort to borrowing and leveraging templates from colleagues, friends, family, and even online. Though not necessarily a bad thing, you have to remember that not all résumés are equal. In fact, not all of your own résumés are equal. Let me explain.

Most people have a single résumé that documents their entire working life. From the moment they stepped off the college campus until now. The résumé is inundated with job descriptions and experiences in a life. The problem with such a resume is that though it may contain what a recruiter or hiring manager is looking for, it also contains a whole lot of things that do not have any bearing to specific job requisition, leaving the hiring manager having to fish for information.

Your résumé should be meaningful. Meaning, the “stories” you choose to share should be relevant to the job you are applying for. This also means that you will have to craft the content of your resume to address the holes that the hiring manager is trying to fill. If every one of your experiences, and more importantly, who you are and how you have behaved in those experiences, demonstrates clearly an ability to address the most pressing needs of the hiring manager, you will have a much better chance of gaining at least an interview.

Remember, your résumé is about you. Not your previous job, not your previous teams. It is about how you have behaved on your job, with your team, through tough situations, delivering certain value and achieving certain results, and how such behavior in such context can achieve the desired results for which the hiring manager is searching. Your goal of writing a résumé is to get your point across, not your entire history. Quantity is not better than quality. So, when you write your résumé, consider these:

Highlight your experiences by using this simple technique that I would like to call the C.A.R. technique.

C—Circumstance

For each experience, start off by offering the context of your experience. What are the business problems that you were trying to solve or the business condition or problem statement that was given to you? What was the gravity of the situation? What are the pain points you are trying to alleviate? As a hiring manager, context is just as important as the characterization of you. If I told you I ran 26 miles, all you know was that I ran 26 miles. You do not know why I did it, how I did it, how long it took, or who was with me. Uphill? Downhill? I really do not know how good or bad of a runner you are. Your résumé needs to tell me who you are, how you have behaved, and the results you have achieved and you cannot do that without a setting.

A—Action

Once I know the gravity of the situation you were in, I want to know how you behaved. Now, this does not mean I want to know what you were tasked to do. I do not really want to know your job description. I want to know how, based on the context that you have just described, you have understood the problem or situation and behaved in the manner that demonstrated your ability to think creatively, to leverage your knowledge appropriately, to communicate broadly, to answer questions succinctly, to deal with animosity professionally, and to collaborate continually. Those are the qualities for which, above all of your credentials and accolades, most hiring managers are looking.

R—Result

This is the part that most people leave out on their résumé. What were the end results? Did you save your organization from needless spending? Did your team avoid certain risks that would have been otherwise unavoidable? What were the tangible benefits realized or improvements achieved that can be directly or even indirectly attributed to your actions? It is not a good story unless you know what happens in the end, so do not leave out the ending to yours!

The Interview

There are so many about how to prepare and do an interview. I will simply remind you of what we have been discussing previously. Your entire job search process is about you as a person, as a worker, and as an employee. Your interviewers will be less concerned about your credentials and your skills than who you are and how you have behaved in your previous professional environments and endeavors.

Your job at the interview is to bring your attitude, which, as we had previously discussed, is demonstrated by the relevance of your skills, your competence that leads to future benefits, your professional connections, and your eminence in the industry. Be a storyteller at the interview and let yourself be the main character. And, remember, the story is about its main character, not about job description or team.

I Already Have a Job

If you already have a job, congratulations. However, we live and work in a very tough and competitive business environment. Someone above could be looking to get rid of your job and someone below you could be looking to take over your job. Having a job is great, but having a career is better. And in order to achieve a successful career, you have to be mindful of the way “jobs” fit into a modern career. In order for you to ditch the “career ladder” and embrace the “career lattice,” you always have to be on the lookout for your next “job.”

Now, looking out for your next job does not mean that you need to apply for new jobs every day. Looking out for your next job means that, every day, you are doing something to prepare yourself to be successful at your next opportunity, whether this next job is with your current organization or not. Reflect on the questions given as follows:

You need to be, in fact, constantly thinking about your personal brand. Your personal brand is your unique promise of value. It is composed of your business expertise and its viability in the marketplace. If you are still holding on to 50-year-old technology and methodology that has not been updated or improved, your expertise may not be as marketable in this fiercely competitive job market. Your brand is also about how you are uniquely known in the marketplace. Do you create value? How do you create value? What character defines you? What are your principles? What will make your brand great will be based on how integral your behavior is to your craft, whether it can be clearly understood and whether it is compelling. Your brand showcases your passion about what you do and subsequently demonstrated by your behavior. This is what will differentiate you from others. A great brand indicates future value, substantiated by past relevant success and well-articulated with confidence and executive presence.

Every Job Is an Audition

You are either auditioning to your current boss or a potential future boss. The term we like to use for auditioning to your current boss is promotion. However, our tradition may have led us into some very unrealistic attitudes toward promotion. We tend to think in terms of the organizational structure and job titles when we should think in terms of ability and influence (remember those?). True promotion is about your ability to influence backed by your experience.

True promotion cannot be easily taken away from you because influence is not guaranteed by a job title. It is by your dedication and effort to your work, your ability to visibly demonstrate your competence, and how well you are connected in the workplace. A title may be a manifestation of someone else’s recognition of your influence, but by then, it is just icing on the cake.

Building Your Network

Having a good professional network does not make you the “teacher’s pet.” Having a good professional network means you have demonstrated professional competence and that you are known in the marketplace for your knowledge, dedication, and ability to communicate. Having a good network can provide you with the exposure to the right experience to allow you to demonstrate your ability and increase your reach in the marketplace. Your network can also help you stay relevant because you connect to others who are just like you—they too can demonstrate their abilities—and learning from other professionals about what is viable in their profession is never a bad thing (Bucero 2010).

If you have not already, it is critical that you begin building your network by identifying those who can be your mentors. You need to learn from those who have been where you are and where you are headed. Learn from their mistakes and failures and how they recovered from those mistakes and failures to achieve results. Mentors can also find opportunities for you to shine and provide insight to how you can personally and professionally improve to maintain the proper “attitude” (in the sense that we have previously discussed).

At the same time, be a mentor. Find someone who is more junior than you and share your experiences and your past mistakes and failures and how you have recovered and succeeded. Find opportunities for them to shine. If you are worried about “grooming someone to replace you,” do not. I have never seen someone losing her job for being a good mentor.

Be Knowledgeable About The Job Market

Do you know what career options you have and where to find jobs in these career sectors? Different careers require different approaches: Some employers look for relevant qualifications for example, postdoctoral positions require a PhD; some specialist environmental or business companies look for applicants with a master’s degree; some employers want applicants to demonstrate relevant skills and experience through previous paid or voluntary work; others have to annual graduate training programs with set deadlines for applications.

Some other people do not care about titles or credentials, and they are looking for experts. Credentials are important for them but the most weight is placed on the experiences the candidate had and how he or she dealt with issues, risks/opportunities, and issues.

Monitor Your Progress

You need to monitor your progress periodically. Your professional environment is in constant change, so you need to be ready for the change. We are now in the era of do-it-yourself career development. Companies less frequently offer formal training—a trend that has been around for years. This may be because employees change jobs so frequently (job tenure now averages about four years) that firms don’t see the value in investing in people who are likely to leave. This is a sharp contrast to the investment that senior leaders used to make in employees. During my almost 14 years at Hewlett-Packard, mostly during the 1990s, “personal development” was treated as a major company initiative.

Unfortunately, organizations today are unknowingly leaving employees with skill gaps and blind spots that can derail careers and organizational effectiveness. And managers are not helping. Too worried about their own hides, most managers do not have time or energy to focus on anyone else’s.

Ideally, organizations would do more to foster career development: encourage more-immediate feedback, develop clear performance criteria, deliver developmental feedback with clarity and tact, and provide resources and incentives for managers to make employee development a priority. But the reality is that the bigger burden is on employees. Workers at all levels must learn to identify their weaknesses, uncover their blind spots, and strengthen their skills. Here are six things you can do to take control of your career development:

Work on Your Purpose and Vision

I found several definitions of purpose: the reason for which something exists or is done, made, or used; an intended or desired result, end, aim, or goal. Other definitions are determination and resoluteness. I believe that every one of us has a purpose. For example, my purpose is “to help organizations to change their attitude to manage more successful projects.” Think about your purpose.

For some people it is not easy to find their purpose but my advice is there to reflect on. It takes a while but is worth. When you discover your purpose, please write it in a document and be committed to pursue it. Remember that you can do it because you are excellent. Identifying your purpose will help you to work on your vision. In the book The Complete Project Manager (coauthored with Randall L. Englund), we explain that the vision consists in a vivid description of your future situation. There are four basic characteristics that a vision needs to have: clear, concise, convincing, and compelling. Work on your vision for some time.

For example, my vision is:

Professional Career Assessment Tool

I have put together an extensive guide to serve as a beginning point and reference for your future career as a project manager. You can now start being part of this line of work right away by reading the basics of each aspect of a project manager’s career growth.

Here are the things that you should consider before starting a project management career:

What Does Being a Project Manager Actually Mean?

Are you always the leader of your group who likes to keep everything and everyone organized and with a goal in mind?

If your answer is yes, you could be on your way to a career in project management. Project management is one of the most complex fields of work out there. Be prepared for a true adventure you’ll never get bored of. There is no space for dullness in this profession. A project manager is responsible for leading an entire project through initiation, planning, execution, control, and completion.

Project managers always work in a team. They are most often sociable and great team players. As a project manager, you will need to adapt to different people, cultures, environments, and situations. Being flexible is key to team communication since you’ll be the builder and controller of the team.

To be a great project manager, you have to be a team leader, coworker, and supervisor at the same time. This is one of the most challenging careers as no day will be the same and you will need all of your skills to solve every problem. Also, you’ll be the first person your team goes to when a problem occurs. They might expect you to hold the answers to any inquiry. But, this is what makes the project management career interesting.

You will deal with both formal and informal interactions. If you believe that you’re a person who knows people well from the second you meet them, this might be the right career path for you. Essentially, the project manager is similar to a psychologist. They know exactly what problems, desires, and expectations employees and clients have. However, despite being a people person, a project manager won’t get emotionally involved in their projects. Some of your duties will include: taking part in the creation process, executing the project, preparing communication methods, finding solutions to recurring issues, monitoring the project’s progress from start to finish, and many more. To put it briefly, you’ll be responsible for connecting each project to the business world and to its clients.

You must be aware that the entire responsibility of the project’s success will fall on your shoulders. You will be held accountable for any mistakes that your team makes or for any client complaints. In this position, you’ll focus both on the accuracy of your work and that of your team.

This profession is always changing and facing new demands. If you’re the kind of person who prefers diversity, this is the type of career you’ll never get bored of. You can always switch the project you’re working on, the team you interact with, the industry you’re involved in, and even the processes and tools to ease your work. No project is the same. Yet, your expertise in this field will prove helpful whenever you’ll come across similar situations and issues in the future. Similarly, your past experience will be essential to solving problems quickly.

A Project Manager’s Skills

Knowledge of project management is sometimes just not enough for you to become a great project manager. As discussed earlier, you need soft skills as well. Being a good communicator and an open leader is not enough. Tackling daily project management challenges also requires accountability, adaptability, analytical and strategic thinking, decisiveness, a stress-resistant personality, and even a bit of love for risk-taking. Being a multitasker with great written and oral communication skills can place you among the top project managers in your sector.

When it comes to hard skills, you should be aware that there is no specific project management skill. In fact, depending on the project, you’ll have to know a bit of everything. General business knowledge is highly desired. Don’t worry though, you don’t need to be an expert in technical skills such as coding. However, being able to give accurate and detailed tasks to your developers is important. Leading a project is all about making sure that your team members lack no information that’s crucial to successfully finish a task and delivering the final project.

You should have the adequate level of knowledge to spot an issue and suggest possible solutions. At the same time, you should know that many project managers have had previous other jobs such as software developers, marketing managers, accountants, designers, and so on. This means that they hold the required solid knowledge for projects related to their previous fields of interest. If you’re one of these people, you might be one step ahead of the others; but you must keep in mind that you’ll also need to develop your own knowledge of project management processes, frameworks, and people management. You might be used to working individually, but project management is all about teamwork. Don’t panic if you end up realizing that working as a project manager is not a right fit for you. This profession creates many new opportunities and pathways for other future careers.

Take a look at the skills of the most successful project managers and find out if you have what it takes to become like them and what you have to improve:

What Does a Project Manager Actually Do?

Depending on the industry you work in, your duties might differ. I analyzed over 200 LinkedIn worldwide job postings and compiled this list of the most common project manager responsibilities:

What’s the Secret of a Project Management Career?

There is no definite secret. Project managers are good at their job for various reasons. Thinking that you hold the secrets of this job can make you believe that you’re prepared for any situation. Nevertheless, there are many problems that could occur anytime, making it impossible for you to know how to solve them without too much struggle. For this reason, it is better to focus on being a great professional rather than on hunting down the secrets of success. Doing what the best PMs are doing won’t guarantee that you’ll become successful like them.

Being passionate and open to change whenever something is not working right though is more important. The project management world is one of the most dynamic business environments. You should be able to adapt to its changing nature and become comfortable in it.

Another tip that project managers might hesitate to share has to do with the use of project management tools. These can automate their tasks and help them manage projects with ease. Finding the perfect tools often takes a lot of time and testing. Also, the apps and techniques you’ll use can depend on your style of work.

More experienced project managers might even be able to tell you some secrets that you’ll find nowhere else. The true secrets of this profession come only with experience. Making mistakes and learning from them is a valid statement even in project management.

Meanwhile, some of the things that you can test are: making sure that you understand the client’s requirements, picking the right team members, being able to create tasks in detail, making sure you have the best tools and systems for finishing the project, focusing on the real issues, setting reasonable requirements, always taking failure into consideration, and creating backup plans.

Do not forget: Testing methods and tools is vital for the project success and for your development as a professional. By testing and experimenting, you’ll be able to learn the secrets of project management on your own. This is beneficial since the tips you’ll get from another project manager might not apply to your project. You must be aware that every PM is different and every project is peculiar in its own way.

How to Become a Project Manager

Where should you actually start your education to become a project manager?

Before you begin your project management journey, you have to see if this career is right for you. Read the stories of other project managers, reach out to them, ask questions, or try a project management internship. Additionally, you can take some introductory online courses to get your first look at this subject. Usually, these courses provide tasks and assignments designed to make you interact with this business branch and see if you can handle its responsibilities.

Remember this: You should never start working as a project manager without having previously discovered the processes and tools commonly used in project management. You have to know if you’re capable of using those techniques and platforms before you take part in a real project.

Before you start looking for a job, write down all of the aspects that your future workplace must have and make a list of what you never want to deal with in your following career. Don’t rush into getting a job just for the sake of working. If you’re at the beginning of your career, you should find a work environment that allows you to grow and learn more from your coworkers.

This takes us to the importance of having a mentor. We’ve previously talked about how you could research the activity of other project managers before deciding whether this path is right for you or not. A role model can shape your entire career. This is the reason why you should find a skilled project manager who’d be able to allocate part of his time to teach you what he already knows. By working close to their side, you’ll master project management methods, methodologies, frameworks, processes, and best practices. A mentor’s purpose is also to honestly highlight your mistakes so that you can use them to further develop yourself.

Know that finding compatible project managers who want to share their wisdom and knowledge can be rather difficult. Most, however, will be willing to do this in return for some help with their tasks. As a result, they’ll involve you in real projects and even supervise you while doing so. This is imperative for a project management novice because you wouldn’t otherwise be able to know if you’re using your theoretical knowledge correctly without someone analyzing your work. Trust is at the base of the trainee–mentor relationship. You believe they’ll share their tips with you and they allow you to work on projects with them.

Education

Your project management career can start with you getting a project manager or business administration degree. Not having a diploma in project management is, however, not a disadvantage; but, if you do study it on a daily basis in an academic environment, you’ll have a head start. It’s never too late to switch to a career that suits your interests. In fact, project management does not belong to only one industry. Usually, projects will belong to another line of business such as software, art, logistics, economics, linguistics, and so on. In fact, a design agency might require you to hold a degree in arts or design for a better understanding of the field. In this case, project management education is entirely up to your own will and desire to improve yourself professionally.

Any college degree can prove helpful for a future project manager since the academic world teaches you how to study and acquire knowledge gradually. This is essential for a project manager that could have to learn all about a new project’s main field in a short time. Self-development, self-learning, and a will to constantly develop oneself throughout a lifetime are vital for keeping your career at the top.

Before deciding on a degree, see how project management works in real life. College activities do not allow you to see the actual consequences of your decisions. Working with a real project can teach you all about accountability and outcome management.

There are also numerous online project management learning resources, blogs, and programs that you can follow. This could be an option if you don’t live close to the college you’d like to attend or if you just don’t have enough time to attend university.

Another way of educating yourself is getting a similar position. You don’t have to begin your career as a PM. You can start from managing smaller projects, products, or even teams. Alternatively, you can go for an internship in this field. Don’t get discouraged if the work you’ll be doing won’t seem like something you’ll love for the rest of your life. Sometimes all it takes is to find a different project to work on. All project managers dream of working in a field that is actually one of their hobbies. If your hobby is in the field of business, you’re lucky.

Project Management Certifications

Are project management certificates still worth it? Of course! As you advance in your career you will either feel the need to certify your project management knowledge or you will be asked by your employer to get a certificate. Although certificates might slowly start losing their importance for recruiters, the experience you’ll get during trainings and exams is indispensable.

Having a project management certificate is a plus, but extensive knowledge and experience in the field matter more for a project’s success. What you must remember is that certificates are not everything. You could have all the diplomas in the world and, yet, if you have no real knowledge or working experience in project management, no one will want to work with you.

Which are the Most Important PM Certificates Out There?

Do not rush into studying for just any project management certification. Some employers don’t even accept them while online certifications are almost useless. Also, you should study for a certification that’s related to the projects you work on or industry you’re involved in.

Income

I always say that I am lucky because I love my profession, but you also need to earn money to make a life. Income is one key thing to think about. Project managers are well paid in general, but it also depends on the industry.

My suggestion is to belong to a professional association like Project Management Institute (PMI) who can give you some clues on project management jobs and salaries. They do some surveys every year with so accurate information on that subject and the survey results are usually published on some of their professional magazines. On the other hand, join a project management professional association and you will have the opportunity to ask questions to other peers and colleagues.

Finally, read business newspapers and business magazines where project management jobs are announced and you will learn in more detail what the market is looking for. Change is also present in market job demands, so learn from it and acquire the habit of reading periodically that type of information and reports.

Chapter Summary

If you want to be successful on your professional career, you need to plan for it. The following are important key points to remind about your professional career:

References

Bucero, A. 2010. Today Is a Good Day: Attitudes for Achieving Project Success. Ontario Canada: Multimedia Publications.

Englund, R.L., and A. Bucero. 2012. “The Complete Project Manager: Building the Right Set of Skills for Greater Project Success.” Paper Presented at PMI^® Global Congress 2012, EMEA, Marseille, France. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.