Project Management Certifications
53Project management certifications or PMP certification is a certificate issued by Project Management Institute. This institute consists of rigorous criteria and holds exams that are based with high difficulty. A student clearing this exam successfully is honored with this certification and this is the main root because of which PM certifications is considered as a valuable asset.
There are two groups or categories of individuals who can pursue project manager training exam. The first group is for those who have a graduate degree and 4,500 hours of constant, non overlapping project management experience for 36 consecutive months since past five years. The other category consists of those project managers who are non graduate and have 7,500 hours of constant, non overlapping project management experience for 60 months over 8 periods. Both these groups must have participated in 35 years of project management training in past 10 years.
Managers who meet the above criteria can file an eligibility application for a certification and if they satisfy PMI criteria then an eligibility letter is released for inviting the candidate for PMP certification exam. The standard pass rate for this certification ranges between 50%- -60%.
The increase in salary packages of IT professionals has attached more importance with project certifications. Membership statistics from this institute state that the Software and IT industries are the top two industries among PMI members, with around 15,000 to 20,000 members respectively in each industry.
People can adopt different ways to become project managers and can even take coaching for clearing this certification. Once this exam is cleared the employee and employer are both benefitted. Employees are rewarded with huge salaries, promotions, perks and incentives while employers who hire PMPS are confident that they have hired managers who have core competency in their respective management field and relevant experience to perform official tasks perfectly.
Studies show that projects handled by people with certificates have more success rate than those who work without this certification and this is why it has become so prestigious.
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While the PMP may not be a masters level certification, it certainly does convey a basic understanding of the overall familiarity of projects. Being a project manager is not the same thing as being an engineer, and they shouldn't be compared in this manner.
Perhaps the success of the PMI and their massive volumes of cash is related to the perception within the industry that it's a meaningful certification. If you hate the concept so much, don't get certified and don't hire those who are.
But, if you see that it has value, embrace it for what it is and use it.
DrPDG 9 months ago
Sorry folks, but IMPO, this article is full of errors in fact and reads more like a paid advertisement for PMI than a rational and unbiased assessment or review.
First, the PMP exam is HARDLY rigorous. 200 multiple choice exam questions with 4 possible guesses of which only 175 actually count and which requires only a grade or score of 62% (106/175) to pass? SURELY you jest?
And as for the hours worked, yes, PMI audits 10% but did you know they don't bother to follow up to see if what the applicant submitted was falsified or not? Worse yet, the applicants don't have to prove they worked on a "successful" project. To put the absurdity of this into perspective, would you get on the next commercial jet if you knew the pilot had never actually taken off or landed a plane successfully? Or how about going in for open heart surgery knowing your cardiac surgeon had never operated on a patient who lived?
Sorry folks- what PMI (and APM with their PRINCE2 credentials) are perpetrating is nothing short of a scam- did you know that PMI has well over 100 million dollars in LIQUID ASSETS? Not too bad for a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit professional organization, huh?
Lastly, I follow research on this topic closely and I have yet to see ANY credible research that links the PMP (or any other credential) to "successful" projects. And I seriously doubt I ever will, simply because there are too many variables to establish any clear cut causal relationship between a certification and the outcomes of a project.
For those who would like to see some research on the various project management credentials, see this article http://www.pmworldtoday.net/featured_papers/2010/f I benchmarked a broad range of project management credentials against the US Professional Engineer (PE) license as well as against Malcolm Gladstone's "10,00 hour" rule and you can see that the PMP scores just about exactly where it should- as an ENTRY LEVEL credential, nothing more.
BR,
Dr. PDG, Jakarta, Indonesia
http://www.build-project-management.com