PMP - Worth the Trouble?

The PM community is very familiar with the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI). Like other certification programs, the PMP confers on the holders an aura of competence in project management by way of documented professional experience, continuing education requirements, and the passing of a graded examination. All of these goals, on the surface, are worthy. However, once one digs deeper, the whole concept of certification is problematic.

Certification programs abound in lots of categories, particularly within information technology disciplines and allied fields, such as PM. For reasons I will expand upon below, I generally have a dim view of certifications, particularly with employers who use them as a 'gate' or checkpoint when evaluating candidates for employment.

Before I continue, I don't hold certifications in any field. I just have college diplomas, some continuing education, a lot of self-education via books/audio, and years of hard-won practical experience on-the-job as both an employee and consultant. These have proven far more valuable to me than any certification bestowed by some organizational 'authority' that is not an employer or an accredited university.

Certification programs (including the PMP certification) suffer from the following problems:

1. They are not licenses to practice the profession, such as those for law or medicine. However, they are often indirectly treated that way.
2. As the number of certifications increases, the number of incompetent and/or inexperienced people being 'certified' also increases.
3. Certifications lose a lot of lustre when it becomes possible to obtain a certifcation simply by going to a commercial 'boot camp' to cram for the certification exam, getting a few continuing education credits, and refactoring one's 'work experience' to meet the professional experience requirements.

Let's take these points in turn:

Certifications are not professional licenses

I'm not going to get into the argument that project managers should be licensed by an authority recognized by governments - that's a separate issue. What I am concerned about is the perception of certifications as a standard or a license that proves competency in the subject area. Worse, these perceptions are owned by hiring managers and human resources staff who screen PM applicants not for experience as a primary factor for futher review, but the fact that the applicant is 'certified.'

The fact is that any certification scheme in almost any field can be gamed, and the PMP certification is not immune to this. Licensed professionals face the termination of their license to practice by the appropriate licensing board if they are found incompetent or committed malfeasance in the performance of their duties. No such avenue exists for PMPs., and with good reason, since its not a license.

So why treat it as such?

Incompetent and Inexperienced People Get Certified

There are bad and poorly-performing doctors and lawyers, and as with any profession, the same hold true in project management. I personally know of three project managers who have been dismal failures in the course of their PM endeavors (not bad people, mind you, but not good or even average PMs) who hold PMP certifications. I have interviewed more than a few certification holders for clients who couldn't tell me what a work breakdown structure is or how to simply determine budget and schedule variances.

Then we have the inexperienced folk who, upon reading how PM is such a burgeoning field with high renumeration for their efforts, refactor their work experience as 'project management' when they actually were project team members or, at best, team leads reporting to a project manager. They get their bosses to sign off on the application form and presto - a newly-certified PMP emerges if they pass the certification exam.

Yeah, I'm aware that PMI "audits" the PMP program to verify credentials stated in applications. That's nice - has anybody had their certification revoked for falsifying their application? Right, I didn't think so.

Its Too Easy To Get Certified

A key indicator that a certification is peaking in popularity is the increase in the number of "boot camps" and other study aids to help one pass the certification exam (which, I'm told, is fairly difficult). Some of these programs claim to have you ready to take the exam within a week or two after attending their program. When coupled with misrepresentation of experience scenarios I just mentioned, it's not surprising that we get "certified" project managers that have never actually managed a project!

The PMP situation reminds me of the Novell NetWare certifications of the 80's and early 90's. Novell Netware was the dominant PC network operating system at the time, and the CNE designation (for Certified Netware Engineer) was a hot commodity to land a job. Of course, the boot camp industry answered the call and cranked out thousands of "certified" Netware engineers over a period of time, with the boot camps lasting all of one week and the primary objective to teach attendees how to pass the exam, and not actually run a real network.

At more than one client, newly minted CNEs were hired with little experience in actually operating a Netware installation, but hey, they have the cert, so they're OK right? That is, until the network they're administering shuts down and the new CNE has no idea how to troubleshoot the problem and get the network back on the air. Why? Because the problems they encountered and the steps to correct the problems weren't on the certification exam!

PMPs with little or no experience are going to find life very difficult when they run into problems (and they will, trust me) that they have no idea how to approach, must less solve.


Should You Get A PMP Certification?

If you are an experienced PM, the certification couldn't hurt. I'm ranting about this today because the cert has been held up as some absolute measure of PM competency by employers, and the only thing that truly proves competency in our profession is actually managing projects and successfully delivering on outcomes on-time and on-budget. Nothing else matters.