When I have decades of experience in Project Management, why do PMP certification???

When you are already a qualified professional, why the need of an accredited certification is the intellectual stew brewing in most the brimming minds. Some are even audacious to declare that no one gets to tell them ‘what they already know’.

You have probably heard it, and I for sure can testify about the lament of a senior manager in the construction industry who managed some awe-inspiring monuments to his credit as the chief architect “can you believe the boss pushing me to get the PMP certified?”, whilst I was a bystander in that conversation then [2 years before]. Today, employed in the education space, I marvel about that man’s predicament and feel miserable in not empathizing with his plight. The opposite of love is not hate. Its apathy. Sometimes, we veer off that direction showing total lack of concern or conventional wisdom. If a civil engineer feels the pressing need for a professional certification, try imagining the IT pros. In all fairness, accreditation makes you suave, savvy and surges your career.

Surely and certainly, PMP® does equip you with the knowledge considered essential and emboldens with a positive spirit to take the ‘corporate bull by its horn’. Given a choice would you want to flaunt your certification or your crazy pay check with incredible numbers? My take? Simple: a judicious mix of both. It’s left to the discretion of the individual in the given circumstances to highlight which but there have been compelling circumstances with dire straits in trying to cloak the pay over post, as they pride more about their position as the salary goes without saying. Market sentiments reek stronger of the smell that emanates when one reads headline as like *Certified PMPs earn 25% more*. It can be dismissed as subjective bereft of substance but the market seems to buy that by gorging the plate dirt clean with no leftover. Such is the frenzy with respondents react in this space that any such comparison is lapped up and when numeric data are inserted to drive home the message, it has a ripple effects and resonates all over the valley.

It makes you more than your worth as corporate hand over paychecks that are getting heftier these days with plum position that one wouldn’t have dreamt of, even vaguely. Yet, that’s the reality and the beauty of certification.

Your thoughts please…..

Laxmi Kant
icertglobal