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Certified vs Competent
December 31, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Certification, Project Management Musings
Certified vs Competent
By Barry Otterholt
Can you gain a professional certification and still be incompetent? Certainly.
Certification does not equal competence.
The professional certification simply acknowledges that you have a threshold of experience that has been verified, and that you’ve learned the PMI processes and knowledge areas sufficiently to pass a test. There’s nothing preventing you from straying from your experience and accepting jobs for which you are unqualified.
The PMP designation evidences a differentiating commitment to the profession, and in my experience PMPs take a higher level of responsibility for their projects than their non-certified counterparts. However, there is nothing in the PMP credential that says you know how to manage a cross-cultural project, a LEAN manufacturing project, a strategic planning project, a revenue maximization project or a cost minimization project. Nothing that says you know how to manage geographically diverse projects, cross-organizational projects, or sector-specific projects. Nothing to say you won’t apply too much formality in a simple project or too little formality in a complex project.
Project management also as its own language, with lots of terms not generally heard in the business-as-usual setting. PMPs might know this language from experience, or it might be learned for the first time when studying for the certification exam. In either case, this language can easily lull a prospective sponsor into believing you have much broader experience than you actually have, and offer you an opportunity that you should not accept.
The question of competence is only answered in terms of the specific needs of each unique project. If you simply asked for an accountant, you could get a cost accountant, governmental accountant, tax accountant, or any of many other areas of experience. The same is true of the PMP. Each PMP has certain experience that distinguished him or her from the pack, and is sufficient to have earned the professional credential. But any of us can demonstrate our incompetence if matched to the wrong project.
Qualify the opportunity before accepting it. Make sure you understand the unique requirements, and verify that you can provide the unique skills when needed.
Barry Otterholt, CMC, PMP
Barry Otterholt has been a project management specialist and coach for the past 30 years. He is a Certified Management Consultant (CMC) and a Project Management Professional (PMP). He works with both public and private sector companies in the USA, Europe and Scandinavia. Mr. Otterholt was a Director with Microsoft, a senior consultant with Deloitte Consulting, and a COO with a nationwide consumer electronics enterprise. In 1988 he founded Public Knowledge, LLC to provide independent management and operational support to the public sector. More recently, he founded Stouffer & Company, LLC to provide as-needed project management services to fill an obvious skills gap in both private and public sectors.
Mr. Otterholt is an adjunct professor teaching project management at Northwest University. His essays on project management have been published in PMI newsletters. His runs a blog, Project Management Essays, where he muses about various project management topics.
Mr. Otterholt is a member of the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) and the Project Management Institute (PMI). He has a BA in Accounting and Computer Science and an MBA in Business Administration. He lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
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