Help me choose a relevant and useful PM-type certification
May 20, 2018 8:45 AM Subscribe
My manager and her higher-ups are very invested in training for me and my team, which is mostly made up of independent contributors. They're planning to pay for some sort of project management certification for me - a certification of my choosing. But which one???
My background: Most of my career has been divided between an initial period of executive assistant work, transitioning into account management/project management in marketing/communications, which then transitioned into project management in the field of healthcare (on the managed care side, not at actual clinical practices).
If it makes a difference, I'm a 40-something female, mid-career, and not terrifically ambitious. I like to do really well at my job and I like to get paid well, but I'm not desperate to become a manager of people. At my current job, 95% of the very large work force is female, which is awesome. But I'd be willing to work in places where that's not the case.
At this point I've been managing and leading inter- and intra-departmental projects from start to finish for about 10 years. These range from small projects with low risk to the occasional super big project with a very high level of risk. On the small projects I'm mostly working with myself, a few team members, and a couple of vendors; on the large projects I'm organizing and managing work product from a huge team of people who make a lot more money than I do and have very fancy titles. (Like "CEO.")
I've backed into a PM role but have never worked with a project manager title. I don't get assigned to lead projects for other departments or teams (at least not usually; the exception is the occasional super big project). My team is responsible for producing certain results, and I come up with ideas for projects to produce those results, get approval, and then lead the project, pulling in the people, teams, and vendors I need to get to the desired outcome.
I've always considered myself "techy" and I work well with technical people in my role. But my tech experience comes from being a geek, not from any specialized IT degree or training. I'm not a coder or developer; I am code- and development-adjacent. I can do my own personal tech support; I generally can't do tech support for anybody else. The projects I work on aren't IT-related, though they often involve making data or software-related requests of our IT, data analytics and business intelligence teams.
I like project management, and I'm pretty good at it. But here's what I would hope a certification could do for me:
1) "Legitimize" my so-far unofficial training as a project manager. As of right now I'd feel like a poser applying for PM jobs outside my own, because though my work is definitely project management, most of my training has been in one field, at one job, at one company, and we use our own home-grown PM tools and practices.
2) Make my job skills portable. I'm a great PM at THIS job, in this field. Ideally, I'd like a certification to help make these skills transferable to other jobs in other fields. Not just in terms of "getting me hired" - though that's pretty important! - but also in terms of preparing me to do the kind of work career PMs do.
Right now I feel like even if I could get hired somewhere else as a project manager, I wouldn't share a common language with other PMs, wouldn't use the tools they are familiar with, and would end up looking incompetent (this could be a bit of imposter syndrome, but I do think it's a legit concern).
I don't actually have plans to move on from this job - it's a great place with great perks and benefits, and my managers love me, so I feel as safe in my job anybody could. But sometimes things happen that you don't plan for... so I want to be ready, just in case.
TL;DR - what PM certification should I pursue to ensure I'm marketable as a PM beyond my current position? PMP? Lean Six Sigma? ... Something else?
My background: Most of my career has been divided between an initial period of executive assistant work, transitioning into account management/project management in marketing/communications, which then transitioned into project management in the field of healthcare (on the managed care side, not at actual clinical practices).
If it makes a difference, I'm a 40-something female, mid-career, and not terrifically ambitious. I like to do really well at my job and I like to get paid well, but I'm not desperate to become a manager of people. At my current job, 95% of the very large work force is female, which is awesome. But I'd be willing to work in places where that's not the case.
At this point I've been managing and leading inter- and intra-departmental projects from start to finish for about 10 years. These range from small projects with low risk to the occasional super big project with a very high level of risk. On the small projects I'm mostly working with myself, a few team members, and a couple of vendors; on the large projects I'm organizing and managing work product from a huge team of people who make a lot more money than I do and have very fancy titles. (Like "CEO.")
I've backed into a PM role but have never worked with a project manager title. I don't get assigned to lead projects for other departments or teams (at least not usually; the exception is the occasional super big project). My team is responsible for producing certain results, and I come up with ideas for projects to produce those results, get approval, and then lead the project, pulling in the people, teams, and vendors I need to get to the desired outcome.
I've always considered myself "techy" and I work well with technical people in my role. But my tech experience comes from being a geek, not from any specialized IT degree or training. I'm not a coder or developer; I am code- and development-adjacent. I can do my own personal tech support; I generally can't do tech support for anybody else. The projects I work on aren't IT-related, though they often involve making data or software-related requests of our IT, data analytics and business intelligence teams.
I like project management, and I'm pretty good at it. But here's what I would hope a certification could do for me:
1) "Legitimize" my so-far unofficial training as a project manager. As of right now I'd feel like a poser applying for PM jobs outside my own, because though my work is definitely project management, most of my training has been in one field, at one job, at one company, and we use our own home-grown PM tools and practices.
2) Make my job skills portable. I'm a great PM at THIS job, in this field. Ideally, I'd like a certification to help make these skills transferable to other jobs in other fields. Not just in terms of "getting me hired" - though that's pretty important! - but also in terms of preparing me to do the kind of work career PMs do.
Right now I feel like even if I could get hired somewhere else as a project manager, I wouldn't share a common language with other PMs, wouldn't use the tools they are familiar with, and would end up looking incompetent (this could be a bit of imposter syndrome, but I do think it's a legit concern).
I don't actually have plans to move on from this job - it's a great place with great perks and benefits, and my managers love me, so I feel as safe in my job anybody could. But sometimes things happen that you don't plan for... so I want to be ready, just in case.
TL;DR - what PM certification should I pursue to ensure I'm marketable as a PM beyond my current position? PMP? Lean Six Sigma? ... Something else?
My former big company employer used PMP so another vote for that
posted by crocomancer at 1:35 PM on May 20, 2018
posted by crocomancer at 1:35 PM on May 20, 2018
All the PMs at the large tech company where I worked either had their PMPs or were in process of getting them. When they would advertise for PMs, PMP was listed as a requirement or nice-to-have. I'd suggest checking PM job ads in your geographic area or desired industry and seeing whether they mention PMP or another credential.
posted by tuesdayschild at 5:20 PM on May 20, 2018
posted by tuesdayschild at 5:20 PM on May 20, 2018
US government in my experience tends to value PMP and train its employees in that, so if you're in an industry where they're a likely employer for you, or likely to contract the sorts of firms you might work at, at some point, that's a vote in favor of that.
Otherwise, I'd recommend you consider basing the decision more holistically on what training the whole team is getting/interested in getting (per your first sentence) - anecdote, but what I found useful about the PMP program was somewhat less the conceptual aspect, though it did help me formalize in my mind things I'd already kind of intuited as I participated in more projects, and more the use of a shared language among all of us working on the projects. That latter benefit wouldn't really have been there if we'd each of us been off getting our own training of choice from different certifying bodies.
posted by solotoro at 6:58 AM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
Otherwise, I'd recommend you consider basing the decision more holistically on what training the whole team is getting/interested in getting (per your first sentence) - anecdote, but what I found useful about the PMP program was somewhat less the conceptual aspect, though it did help me formalize in my mind things I'd already kind of intuited as I participated in more projects, and more the use of a shared language among all of us working on the projects. That latter benefit wouldn't really have been there if we'd each of us been off getting our own training of choice from different certifying bodies.
posted by solotoro at 6:58 AM on May 21, 2018 [1 favorite]
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posted by chesty_a_arthur at 1:22 PM on May 20, 2018