My wife is planning to get her PMP

My wife would like to have a career change and is looking at this cert. She have a bachelor degree in marketing and have been working as a receptionist at a dental office. What do you guys recommend for her to quickly get her 4,500 hours and 35 hours?

Taken from their website:
Prerequisites
Secondary degree (high school diploma, associate’s degree or the global equivalent)
7,500 hours leading and directing projects
35 hours of project management education
OR

Four-year degree
4,500 hours leading and directing projects
35 hours of project management education

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Comments

lamont29

Have her go to the PMI.org and register to become a member. This can be done without passing the PMP. Then there are various volunteer opportunities available. If she does a good job there (while accumulating hours) she might get offered a job as a project coordinator... that role counts as well as the volunteer hours. It's a start...

LR

mzx380

The 35 hour training is the easy part, just register for a course online. If she does not have the requisite experience, she may benefit from paying significantly more but attend classroom training which will be a good primer and fulfill the hours at the same time.

Getting experience will be a lot harder. If she does not have any experience leading a project (which it sounds like she doesn't), she may want to start with CAPM exam first which will give her more to work with when applying for PM or coordinator positions.

NetworkNewb

Did anyone else read that title as "pimp" at first?

Sorry, I have no valuable contribution. Best of luck to her!

E Double U

NetworkNewb wrote: »

Did anyone else read that title as "pimp" at first? !

Dude, I was thinking exactly that! My wife is planning to get her pimp - sounds like a Jerry Springer episode title.

DatabaseHead

PMP is for project managers who have been in the trade for a while. No offense but this is why this certification is no longer viewed as being "valuable". I would suggest taking courses from Coursera or another provider and learning the methodology, process, tools etc.....

datacomboss

The certification has plenty of value. In fact, it's the most valuable cert I have.

tedjames

She may consider starting with Project+.

za3bour

I don't think the certificate is as valuable now as before it is however still popular and still requested by companies/recruiters. Do a simple search on LinkedIn or any job search site such as glassdoor, indeed or dice and you will find plenty of opportunities that are looking for PMP.

TheProfezzor

Getting the PDU's is the easy part. The easiest I could find was this training here. It's a good training, offered by a PMI accredited source. Now comes the experience part. The whole point of being a PMP is to have the skills and the experience to showcase competencies in Project Management. This can only be achieved by getting into the project management or coordination roles. Registering with PMI and volunteering for opportunities can help get her some experience under her belt. I guess things can be a lot clearer afterwards.

DatabaseHead

datacomboss wrote: »

The certification has plenty of value. In fact, it's the most valuable cert I have.

That's anecdotal at best......

Any IT shop worth their weight in salt have moved to some derivative of agile. GANTT charts have been replaced by Kanban boards and long planning cycles are no longer tolerated and have been replaced by the 2 week sprints. Anyone who has been in app development knows this. With the business leaders driving the business they don't want to be told no we are to ridged and inflexible to change scope. If IT is not enabling their business to go to market fast they are worthless.

PMP aligns with Waterfall and that's why they are desperately getting into the agile space. It's real world, intuitive and worth something...

lamont29

I don't know why anyone with any experience in the field at all would say the the PMP certification no longer has value... that's just not true at all. There are plenty of jobs out there that REQUIRE the PMP in order for you to even apply for the position. All of the advice on here is not GOOD advice!

JoJoCal19

I definitely wouldn't say the PMP holds no value, but DatabaseHead is spot on in that companies are running (not walking) away from the Waterfall method, and towards Agile (or some form of it). Companies definitely do ask for the PMP, but I've also seen them adding the Agile/Scrum certs in there as well. And it's not just projects that companies are moving towards Agile on, but also their other business processes.

DatabaseHead

OP Sorry for partially being responsible for hijacking you thread, this will be my last post on this thread.

There are a couple of different ways of looking at this. I'll retract my statement and reinstate it by saying: The PMP not as valuable as it once was and in the future will become even less valuable.

Couple of points to be made why this is happening.

The PMP was originally designed ~1980. It's an old methodology that for the most part has stolen operational, financial, risk, quality and a few other management disciplines. Anyone who went to a decent school will have some exposure to these. In fact anyone who reads a decent book on these individual management disciplines can gain enough knowledge.

This discipline is really all about physical projects. Building bridges over massive rivers, new casino, and large physical infrastructure projects. Once the concrete is poured for these buildings its realllllly expensive to redo that work. Same with electrical contractors etc.... These need massive planning cycles, you can't half ass a bridge and expect thousands of people to drive over it everyday, the business is assuming way to much risk. For these types of projects it's great. I would even bucket data center build outs, with generators and all supporting infrastructure falling into the category. So it has value but.......

Most IT / Business projects don't align or require that type of project management style. In fact most of you aren't project managers, you are project coordinators or leads with some responsibilities. Even if your title says PM.

The business / IT / BI pretty much all verticals are using agile methodologies to manage their projects. Usually have a charter or scope document with some light planning and heavy execution cycles with a major focus on iterative mindset and encouraging scope change to better suit the business. This methodology has flaws but is far superior to Waterfall.

That's why you see agile tools being used over the traditional tools. I can't tell you the last I saw a GANTT chart, they don't exist and if they do they are generally high level fluff on a PowerPoint with some artificial time lines. Companies have elected to go with Kanban boards, backlogs with grooming sessions, daily stand ups, sometimes just weekly and a whole host of other techniques. This is reality you can face or not, I don't care to be honest.

Over the course of 3 years I have interviewed and had casual conversations with recruiters in regards to positions that require a certain element of project coordination. To be blunt, they want agile, period.

What they don't care about

MS Project / Gantt charts
Bloated project documentation (Risk registers, supplier scorecards etc.......)
Anything waterfall, it actually can hurt you..... I've seen it, it's happened to me.

What they want

Are you comfortable working in team rooms?
Are you comfortable dealing with 15 minute SCRUMS in the morning?
Can provide reporting to senior leadership out of JIRA, using Epics, stories, sub stories while managing your project deliverables?
Do you have understanding of backlogs and why they exist?
Kanban boards
Moving scope

I honestly don't care if you think my advice is crap or not. Bottom line is your post was relevant in 2008, not 2018.....

jcp1856

DatabaseHead wrote: »

Anything waterfall, it actually can hurt you..... I've seen it, it's happened to me.

Agree, the waterfall methodology is outdated and should never be used

datacomboss

DatabaseHead wrote: »

OP Sorry for partially being responsible for hijacking you thread, this will be my last post on this thread.

There are a couple of different ways of looking at this. I'll retract my statement and reinstate it by saying: The PMP not as valuable as it once was and in the future will become even less valuable.

Couple of points to be made why this is happening.

The PMP was originally designed ~1980. It's an old methodology that for the most part has stolen operational, financial, risk, quality and a few other management disciplines. Anyone who went to a decent school will have some exposure to these. In fact anyone who reads a decent book on these individual management disciplines can gain enough knowledge.

This discipline is really all about physical projects. Building bridges over massive rivers, new casino, and large physical infrastructure projects. Once the concrete is poured for these buildings its realllllly expensive to redo that work. Same with electrical contractors etc.... These need massive planning cycles, you can't half ass a bridge and expect thousands of people to drive over it everyday, the business is assuming way to much risk. For these types of projects it's great. I would even bucket data center build outs, with generators and all supporting infrastructure falling into the category. So it has value but.......

Most IT / Business projects don't align or require that type of project management style. In fact most of you aren't project managers, you are project coordinators or leads with some responsibilities. Even if your title says PM.

The business / IT / BI pretty much all verticals are using agile methodologies to manage their projects. Usually have a charter or scope document with some light planning and heavy execution cycles with a major focus on iterative mindset and encouraging scope change to better suit the business. This methodology has flaws but is far superior to Waterfall.

That's why you see agile tools being used over the traditional tools. I can't tell you the last I saw a GANTT chart, they don't exist and if they do they are generally high level fluff on a PowerPoint with some artificial time lines. Companies have elected to go with Kanban boards, backlogs with grooming sessions, daily stand ups, sometimes just weekly and a whole host of other techniques. This is reality you can face or not, I don't care to be honest.

Over the course of 3 years I have interviewed and had casual conversations with recruiters in regards to positions that require a certain element of project coordination. To be blunt, they want agile, period.

What they don't care about

MS Project / Gantt charts
Bloated project documentation (Risk registers, supplier scorecards etc.......)
Anything waterfall, it actually can hurt you..... I've seen it, it's happened to me.

What they want

Are you comfortable working in team rooms?
Are you comfortable dealing with 15 minute SCRUMS in the morning?
Can provide reporting to senior leadership out of JIRA, using Epics, stories, sub stories while managing your project deliverables?
Do you have understanding of backlogs and why they exist?
Kanban boards
Moving scope

I honestly don't care if you think my advice is crap or not. Bottom line is your post was relevant in 2008, not 2018.....

I definitely agree about the bloated documentation.

The PMP is more valuable for me because it is a JOB REQUIREMENT as it is in many large organizations.

I manage data center programs and projects and I use waterfall, scrum and kanban. They're tools that I use to get the job done depending on the situation.