Ethical issue with PMI!

As you know, any member, volunteer, or certified person from PMI agrees to its code of conduct, which consists of four ethical principles, including truthfulness. I believe PMI itself has violated this principle.

The violation

Go to the main page about the PMP certificate: https://www.pmi.org/certifications/types/project-management-pmp

There you find this claim:

The PMP also increases your earning potential. PMP certification holders earn 20 percent more than their non-certified peers according to Earning Power: Project Management Salary Survey, Ninth Edition.

This is a false claim.

The reason

It is a false claim, because all that we can know from the survey is that, on average, those who are certified earn 20% more. It doesn’t show a causal relationship: we can’t tell people that their salaries may increase because of the certification.

For example, maybe this is the case: only people who earn more money are comfortable spending it on becoming certified. In that case, you’ll see that they have a higher salary when you survey, just because the certificate is biased towards people with higher salaries to begin with. This is a reverse causality.

Maybe there’s no causal relationship between the two; for example, only those who care more about project management are interested enough in becoming certified. On the other hand, they are more successful (and therefore earn more money) just because they care more.

This is a classical mistake of confusing correlation for causation. The right way of examining the causal relationship is to have an experiment like this: we pick 2000 project managers randomly. Then we divide them into two groups (randomly again): one is the control group, and we don’t do anything with them. The other group are those we help to learn and become PMP certified. Then we wait a few years, and finally compare their salaries. If we see a higher salary in this group compared to the control group, we can confidently claim that becoming PMP certified increases your earning potential.

So, to summarize, the PMI claim is not truthful, and therefore, unethical.

Wrong argument, right conclusion

Don’t take me wrong, I’m not against PM certifications, and I’ve explained my reasons here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/oh-dont-you-have-pm-certificate-nader-k-rad-pmp

And besides that, I earn a living by helping people learn and get certified; we have already published a free Awareness course about the PMBOK? Guide too: https://mplaza.pm/pmbok

But as you know, coming up with the right conclusion doesn’t mean that the argument is correct.

I’ve already communicated it with PMI, and I’m looking forward to receiving their reply.