How to Build a Career in Project Management If You Are an IT Professional

I have not limited myself to IT professionals, but have also considered the case of quality management pros and people from other, non-IT backgrounds looking to get PMP certified.

In my experience, a step-by-step learning path wherein the aspirant takes a certification appropriate to their experience level works best.

Step 1 - Project Management Foundation - Experience range - 1 - 5 years

Gain real world experience

At this stage, you are working as a project team member or a module leader. Continue to accrue work experience on live projects. Gain as much knowledge about project management processes, tools, and techniques as possible. Understand various roles in a project, such as analysts, designers, developers, testers, project leaders and managers and their respective responsibilities.

Acquire best-in-class certifications

Certifications establish your credentials. The Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM?) is a valuable entry-level certification for project managers, offered by the Project Management Institute. It ensures that the certified individual has fundamental knowledge of project management and its associated processes.

There are many online training courses available these days.

This certification helps you to demonstrate to employers that you are dedicated to a career in project management.

If you are working in the IT Services domain and want to advance further in your career, you must possess an ITIL Foundation Certification. The ITIL Foundation certification is an essential requirement for professionals who need a basic understanding of the ITIL? framework and how it may be used to enhance the quality of IT service management within an organisation. 

Step 2 - Project Management Practitioner to Expert - Experience range: 5 - 10 years

Gain some more real world experience

At this stage you are probably working as a Project Leader or Project Manager. This is the time to learn to work with and lead teams. Large projects owe much of their success to team work. Knowledge and experience of project management processes, tools, and techniques becomes even more important as you take up more senior roles with greater responsibilities. Start looking at the various stages of a project - Initiation, Planning, Execution, Monitoring & Controlling, and Closing. Pay attention to knowledge areas - Scope, Schedule, Cost, Resources, Risk, Quality, and others, as applicable to your projects.

Acquire best-in-class certifications for this level of expertise

Project management certification is an essential professional requirement across industries for senior project management roles.

With around 2-3 years of experience leading and directing projects (4,500 hours of hands-on experience in project management), you become eligible to take up the next level of PMI certification, called PMP. The Project Management Professional (PMP)? is the most important industry-recognized certification for project managers.

The PMP also increases your earning potential. PMP certification holders earn 17 percent more than their non-certified peers according to the Project Management Salary Survey—Eighth Edition.

The PMP signifies that you speak and understand the global language of project management, and connects you to a community of professionals, organisations, and experts, worldwide.

In addition, many online training courses from top companies exist to train aspirants for the PMP certification such as eis.co.in

Are you working on Agile projects?

If you are working on projects using Agile methodology, then you must opt for a PMI-ACP (PMI Agile Certified Practitioner) certification.

If you’re experienced using agile approaches, have good collaboration skills, eagerly embrace complexity, and thrive on rapid response times, then an ACP certification will help showcase your talents.

The PMI-ACP spans many approaches to agile, such as Scrum, Kanban, Lean, extreme programming (XP), and test-driven development (TDD.) So it will make you more versatile, wherever your projects may take you.

Learning Project Management tools is essential

As a project manager, you are required to analyse and plan project resources, budgets, and schedules. It can be an overwhelming task if done manually. That's why you need a business productivity tool such as MS Project (by Microsoft). You can efficiently track project progress and forecast resource needs with the help of reports.

Learning MS Project and getting certified is highly recommended because it sets you apart from your colleagues and ensures you get recognized for your knowledge and skill.

Are you a Business Analyst looking to expand your horizons? A CBAP is the way to go!

If you work for an organisation where domain skills & knowledge about Banking & Financial Services or Insurance or Telecom or Retail or any other vertical is essential for your role, then I would recommend taking up the CBAP (Certified Business Analysis Professional) Certification to advance further in your career.

As Project Manager, it is desirable that you understand the core business functions of the organisation you work for, as well as those of your client's organisation. CBAP? training helps professionals analyse business activities and better meet business needs by delivering actionable, data-driven insights.

There is a rapidly growing number of professionals who are CBAP certified across the world, and acquiring one will make you eligible to become part of an exclusive, worldwide group of Business Analysts. You will gain greater recognition from employers, enhance your earning potential, and be able to tap into a global pool of Business Analysis knowhow.

Are You From an IT Services Background?

If you work in the IT Services area and wish to advance further in your career, an ITIL Intermediate Certification is almost a must-have at this stage. With training in ITIL and a certification, you will:

 1. Gain a comprehensive understanding of the purpose, objective, and scope of service strategy, service design, service transition, service operations, and Continual Service Improvement

2. Learn how to apply ITIL tools, techniques, and concepts to improve efficiency and effectiveness in business changes to optimise customer experience

What if I regularly deal with quality and process improvement?

If you are working in the Quality & Process improvement area, the Six Sigma Green Belt Certification is probably the best and most popular certification to look at. This will help you move closer towards your goal of becoming an all-round Project Manager with a good grasp of quality & process improvement principles. These are key areas of performance for any project manager.

Six Sigma, a business strategy that is widely used across industries, was originally developed by Motorola Inc. The Certified Six Sigma Green Belt (CSSGB) credential helps professionals establish skills in the methodology for eliminating defects in a process. The certification helps potential employers to achieve operational excellence.

Step 3 - Program Management Practitioner to Expert - Experience range – 10 years and above

At this stage, you would already be an experienced project manager, with experience managing large projects or entire portfolios of smaller projects. You would be well-versed with project management processes, knowledge areas, tools, and techniques. You are considered an expert in your area and provide project leadership. You start contributing at the organization-level by sharing your experience through blogs and white papers on project management topics.

Look for opportunities to manage challenging projects and programs. You manage multiple, related projects in a coordinated way, achieving benefits that could not accrue if the projects were handled separately.

Generally, if you have around 7 years of project management experience, you become eligible for a Program Manager position, in which role you start managing multiple, related projects.

Keep yourself up-to-date with world-class certifications

The Program Management Professional (PgMP)? is an industry-standard certification for Program Managers.

As a program manager, you’re a senior-level practitioner at the forefront of your organisation’s leadership team, advancing strategic goals and monitoring multiple projects at once. With training Program Managers, an organisation’s program management process reaches maturity, and its projects are far more successful than without it — 76 percent compared to 54 percent, according to the Pulse of the Profession? report.

The Program Management Professional (PgMP)? is a demonstrated validation of your advanced experience and skill and gives you a distinct advantage in employment and promotion.

If you are working in the IT Services area, at this stage of your career you should complete all the relevant ITIL Intermediate level Certifications for your area of work so that you can move on to take up an ITIL Expert level certification.

Once I’d concluded this, I turned to Mark: "Are you now clear now about the Project Management Career Path?" Mark was visibly very happy and said, "Yes - absolutely! Now I am very clear how to go about achieving my career dream. Thank you very much for your guidance." 

The way ahead

While Mark now certainly had a great deal of clarity about his career, a lot of aspirants stumble when it comes to charting out a career path to get to their stated objective. From experience, I know that the most popular role for Project Managers on the market is that of Sr. Project Manager.

This prompted me to devise a learning path well suited to professionals from an IT background who wish to become Senior Project Managers. Understandably, it would require that the aspirant must have at least 2 years of work experience and be well versed with the IT services industry, though this is not imperative.

To start off, an Information Technology Infrastructure Library or ITIL Foundation course introduces the aspirant to the world of IT Service and Architecture. ITIL Foundation training covers a global set of best practices for IT Service Management, which deals with the alignment of IT Services with business needs it also describes processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists that can be applied by organisations for establishing integration with the organisation's strategy, delivering value, and maintaining a minimum level of competency.

With the basics of IT Service Management clear to aspirants, it is recommended that they should take up project management tool knowledge to start aligning their knowledge to implement them via plans. The reason this becomes more important with experience is that a plan is only as successful as its execution. At the moment, there is no tool more popular than Microsoft Project 2013. As the world’s most popular Project management tool, one can create Gantt charts, plan budgets, track progress, and do much more with MS Project.

Some level of expertise with MS Project 2013 is a must for Project Managers in today’s world.

Armed with these credentials, the aspirant now reaches a stage where the budding project manager must choose between two parallel paths to progress further. The choice is about choosing between the PRINCE2 Foundation and Practitioner certification and the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.

While the eternal PRINCE2 vs PMP debate rages on, the simplest answer is that PRINCE2 is better suited to projects originating from the UN and European regions, while PMP is best suited and highly regarded in the Americas. Additionally, while PMP gives one the ability to plan as per the waterfall methodology, PRINCE2 is an ideal fit for a product approach, or is recommended for a more universal view of the Project Management domain. For more details on the difference between PMP and PRINCE2, please refer to the article, PMP vs PRINCE2 – The Battle of Certifications

At this stage, once the professional has acquired basic Project Management skills, one must look to hone one’s skills from here to evolve into an agile professional as the entire industry is now pivoted around one or more varieties of agile. The need for rapid and quick development cycles have led to a multi-iterative approach in software development, be it product or service, and hence it is recommended that the aspirant take up the PMI –ACP certification as it educates them on the best practices of agile and its philosophies which are critical to the success of any project.

Once you have acquired proficiency in Waterfall and Agile practices, there is just one extra mile left for the Project manager to take the next leap, which is Quality Management. While both PRINCE2 and PMP cover a few aspects of Quality Management, it is advisable to take up training in Lean Six Sigma Green Belt to ensure that the quality standards are constantly maintained when delivering any product - be it a service or a standard product. Consistently delivering high quality outcomes is the true mark of a successful Project Manager.

As you progress in your career, the responsibilities of your role will increase in sync. Project managers generally start experiencing the fatigue of managing multiple projects at the same time, and it is imperative to evolve to cope with rising pressures, for it may very likely happen to you, too. The teams of multiple projects may operate from geographically dispersed locations as resources may be scarce, but the timelines, budgets, and strategic objectives are still critical.

This is where a Program Management Professional certification from PMI can bring the requisite skills to manage the entire program to the table - this is aligned to PMI and is hence a natural progression for a PMP holder. AXELOS offers a similar certification for those committed to the PRINCE2, namely the MSP or Managing Successful Programs credential.

This suggested learning path will lead the professional to the desired goal of becoming a Sr Project Manager in the IT industry. Although various alternative approaches exist, based on experience, I would still recommend this as the optimal learning path for an IT professional to become a Sr Project Manager, to the best of my knowledge. No one can undermine the critical importance of experience, but adding skills to hone them at a faster pace is most rewarding.