Why PMP Certification is the Best for Project Management Professionals

One of the lessons that we learnt in the pandemic is that the organization needs to adapt to changing situations. This puts more onus on the project managers to be able to handle any project situation. As a project manager, you need to be as comprehensive as you possibly can. If you want to ace your game, you need to do 3 things:

• Learn from the best sources
• Practice your skills on a daily basis
• Pursue challenging opportunities

A Project Management Professional (PMP) credential helps you with these goals.

Every few years, PMI runs the Role Delineation Study. That is, it talks to project managers across various industries, geographies, and domains to understand how project management practices are evolving. Based on the findings, PMI then updates the PMP Examination Content Outline document – the syllabus for the PMP exam.

In PMI’s own words, “A role delineation study is a widely used method for identifying the function, or role, played by professionals who are responsible for a particular range of professional practices”. The idea is to keep PMP aligned with the industry. This means that, if you are a PMP, you know about the latest project management approaches, processes, and practices.

That is not all. The syllabus of PMP covers all the aspects of project management which are:

• Scope management
• Schedule management
• Cost management
• Quality management
• Resource management
• Communication management
• Risk management
• Procurement management
• Stakeholder management

But what about the Agile approach? Quite a lot of projects are managed with this approach nowadays. Agile is an adaptive approach to software development projects that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster, while being able to manage changes to initial requirements. This practice is gaining momentum nowadays as more companies are looking to adapt their product development efforts for faster delivery to market.

Remember the Role Delineation Study? The latest study discovered the importance of Agile. Now, the latest PMP syllabus covers Agile project management.Not just this, PMI also discovered that many organizations use a combination of Agile approaches and/or Predictive (or traditional) approaches. This is called the Hybrid approach. The PMP syllabus now covers this as well. As you can see, with PMP you have one of the most comprehensive certifications on your hands.

PMP syllabus is not limited to any particular industry, because it is not prescriptive. It does not give you a set of rules. One of the reference books used for the PMP exam is the Project Management Body Of Knowledge, or in short, the PMBOK Guide.

It does not give you a framework. But a set of processes under the cross-section of a Knowledge Area and Process Group. Each process describes a set of inputs, and a set of tools and techniques that can be applied to these inputs, which result in a set of outputs. It also specifies a practice called Tailoring. Which means, you as a project manager, can decide which project management approach, process, inputs, tools, techniques, or outputs you will use in the project.

What this means is that once you are a PMP, even if you change the field of work (from Construction to IT, for example), you are good as gold. There will be no impact either for the company that hires you, nor difficulty for you to manage projects.

One of the benefits of PMP is PMI membership perks. This gets you a discount on exam fee, access to free soft copy of PMBOK Guide and Agile Practice Guide books, tons of free premium content, and discounts on publications. It also gets you the opportunity to connect with various project management professionals across the globe, (who have the same membership area).

PMP has a recertification cycle of 3 years, which is essential to maintain your PMP credentials. The process is simple: you have to earn 60 Professional Development Units (PDUs) over a period of 3 years.

Here’s the fastest and most economical way to earn this:

Each hour you spend listening to a premium webinar on a project management topic earns you one PDU. And as a member of PMI, you can listen to these webinars for free. Just log into projectmanagement.com and listen 1-2 such webinars on each weekend.

The great thing about this is you can connect to those presenters and build a very strong professional network as well! Moreover, you can connect to many other PMPs on professional network platforms such as LinkedIn, through PMP study support forums.

This ability to build a network with project managers helps you in many ways:

• Seek mentoring
• Look for joint ventures
• Take help to land a job of your choice

Get help on a project that needs specialized expertise.

PMP is the only certification that is preferred by the majority of companies across the globe. The US, Australia, Asia, and some parts of Europe prefer PMP, and other parts of Europe prefer Prince2 (with a second preference given to PMP).

Have you noticed organizations adding PMP as a good-to-have or must-have credential in their job descriptions?

Many hiring managers even use the absence of PMP as a filtering criterion.  The complexity of this certification is an indication that those that are certified have truly mastered the concepts.

“Mastered the concepts”?

Yes, PMP is not a read-recall-write type of certification exams. In other words, this is not an exam that simply tests your knowledge. This exam truly tests your ability to apply the concepts to the project scenario described in the questions. That tells your potential hiring manager that as a PMP you know how to handle difficult project situations. And this validation is a huge factor for hiring companies.

PMP is considered as a part of the selection process for contractors as well. Bottom line: PMP gives you undeniable credibility, job opportunities in the market, and higher compensation, as per PMI’s latest survey.

PMI conducts Project Management Salary survey every other year. Just like the Role Delineation Study, this survey is taken by project managers across 40 countries. It is taken by project managers in various positions in the hierarchy, where they share their salary figures anonymously.

It is consistently found that project managers with PMP earn more than those without PMP credentials. For the past few years, the median salary for PMPs has been found to be 16% to 25% more than non-PMPs in the United States alone.

This salary data is from survey respondents in the United States and 36 other countries.

The latest survey that came earlier this year indicates that despite the pandemic, the average median salary of PMP-certified project managers is 16% higher! This goes to prove that no matter how the economy is, a project manager is always in demand!

Well, if you are a project manager and want to leverage these 5 points to grow quickly, consider PMP certification. There are 3 steps involved in growing your career to the next level:

Here are a few top options to help you get PMP certified:

• PMI’s official self-paced PMP course
• Henry Harvin’s PMP Plus Specialist course (including design thinking)
• Cornelius Fitchner’s PMPrepCast video course
• Edureka's PMP Certification course
• Simpliearn’s bootcamp which you can attend from home
• Skillshare's Project Management: Master Project Management - PMP/PMI
• PMExamSmartNotes’ Last Mile program uses hybrid approach: videos + personal coaching