There is an ongoing debate about the relevant and value of getting professional certifications in project management versus academic qualifications in project management.
It should be depending on your career phase, interest and current project management knowledge and competencies.
For a young graduate who is keen in project management, he or she could consider a Bachelor degree in PM or related degrees with PM focused.
As for working professionals who like to shift to pm career, he or she might consider to pursue a Master degree or post-graduate diploma in PM. Try to gather as many pm experience as possible. Volunteer yourself to participate in projects.
However, project managers who have sufficient years of experience, it is more worth considerating to get a professional certification like PMP or PRINCE2 Practitioner. Academic qualifications might not be so meaningful at this stage.
Another possibility is to get a Doctorate degree in PM or a PhD if one is really very interested in conducting further research in PM and to contribute theoretical knowledge in PM.
Lastly, it is depending whether the certifications or academic qualifications have any contributions to your career advancement and to the organizations you are working with. Personal interest is another key consideration.
Welcome to share your thoughts.
As you have started a discussion I would like to add my bit. As per my scenario I am a guy who worked in Indian Army for last 6 years. As it was a short service commission and due to conditions specific to my case I quit my illustrious army job and am now back in civil life. What I found coming out was either people want to hire me as a Security Manager or Admin Manager, both not very interesting for me (let me say I have a bit of finance academic qualification, as I was pursuing CA bofore this). Now I heard some people advice me to look for opportunities in project management. How can I go about it? Also then many told me that it is more of a software industry job so you should have a software background to do it? As per what I understand a project can be anything and not necessarily a software project? Help me if possible by giving your valuable suggestions on the same.
The Project Management as a discipline and profession is not yet matured in the industry as compared to other professions like Medicine, Law, Engineering and Accounting. Theoretically, project management should be able to be applied across industries and organization (ie. the skills and knowledge should be portable). For instance, CPA could be an accountant in any company and PMP should also be a Project Manager in any company as well.
However, to date, people still associate project management mainly to construction industry or IT industry. In fact, most of the IT Project Managers are "accidental Project Managers". ie. they are experienced software developers or IT engineers who have been called upon to lead some projects and eventually turned into "Project Managers" without formal project management training and experience.
Sachin: with your background in Army and finance acdemic qualification), perhaps you could consider to take up some formal project management training (either certification or academic qualification) and look up for opportunities in the financial industry for project managers. Alternatively, you could look up for government's related organisation that advertising for project management positions. You might have some advantages with your background from Army.
Hope this helps.
Thank you for your valuable insight...... will have to still decide on the way to take..... though govt related thing is a passe as I think, if I had to work in govt org then army was the best place.... as I have been there done that... will concentrate on either the corporate sector or an entrepreneurial venture.... thanks
essentially, support the argument for academic qualification of the domain area before professional certification. in my involvement of project, i am challenged to do further explanations to participants who do not have technical competence in the subject are but are PMs.
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