Project management certification path?

kbowen0188

After I finish my CCNA, I was going to either work on a Windows 7 certification or a PM certification. My supervisor seemed quite a bit more enthusiastic about a PM certification, which let me to research. I was recommended to either Project+ or an ITIL Foundation cert, though I think the second one isn't actually PM.

However, from what I can tell, a lot of people are saying Project+ is useless. As a person with minimal Project Management experience, is it a good foundation? Is there a better certification to start with when it comes to Project Management? I am merely looking for an understanding of it so I can be a better employee when I am involved in a project, and if I am given control of a project... but I would like to keep my options open to furthering my PM certification in the future.

N2IT

It's not useless from a learning perspective however from an hiring perspective it's not industry standard. The PMP is but that requires years of service and it focused primary on service and infrastructure projects, not software. For me personally a lot of "which route to go" would depend on the type of work you are going to manage. If you are managing a data center project the PMP or CAPM (the junior level PMP essentially) would be a decent way to go. However if you are managing a application development effort then the PMP would be fairly useless IMO. SCRUM or Agile would be a better certification / methodology to go with. If the project is service related like a help desk implementation the ITIL foundation would probably help a lot more than the PMP. Even though it's a service management certification and not a project management one it would help a lot more IMO in the situation. I personally like SCRUM and Agile because IMO it's real world project management. Very little planning strong focus on delivery and execution.

ThePawofRizzo

I'd say go for both. Project+ is FAR from PMP, but I don't want to be a project manager, rather my objective for taking it was learning some basics about what's involved in project implementation, and at the time I could update a Novell MCNE. At that level Project+ is very suitable.

I recently took ITIL Foundations, which admittedly I would not have had we not gotten the training at work. In the end it was very useful for learning a framework to provide IT services better, and overall for my career I think it was worthwhile for a resume. I'm familiar with SCRUM and Agile, but in IT support it seems like ITIL is more recognized.

If you're longterm goal is PM I would say go for PMP. If you're not sure, perhaps consider Project+ to learn more about it. If you do PMP I would suggest looking at some ITIL, SCRUM, or Agile foundational certs as well as you would likely be using those frameworks in PM moreso.