The demand for professionally certified project managers has grown significantly since the mid-1980s and organizational policymakers today associate certification with project manager competence. Despite its popularity, there is little evidence that certification is related to improving the quality of actual projects… Contrary to the hypothesis, results indicated that certification was statistically significantly correlated with poorer project quality.
That was from an excellent dissertation by Jenifer Robertson. The results should cause us to wonder what has led to the certification culture, often made a requirement for certain careers. What is particularly interesting is the fact that she expected to see certification correlated with better outcomes.
I’d like to see more on these results. Are there any replications, or different approaches? What do people at the Project Management Institute think about it?
Ultimately, the Government is reimbursing most of the cost of certifications. It has sprung an entire industry. We should know whether the public is getting their money’s worth for it.
Here’s some more:
The project orientation of modern work is a model that is flexible, adaptive, and purpose-driven; it is a model that is necessary to keep pace with the rapid innovations of the late 20th and early 21st century. Information work happens in staid old office buildings, on modern office campuses across ping-pong tables and easy chairs, in city parks and libraries, on subways and airplanes — the information worker is connected all the time and from everywhere.
Teams are held together not by collectively meeting specific productivity quotas but by meeting the common objective of delivering whatever product or service brought the team together. The work is purpose-driven and project-based; it is focused more on delivering value to the end customer and less about following standards for the sake of standards.
I’ve seen my company when putting forward whitepapers that the government turns into RFPs pick whatever arbitrary certifications the team already has and list those as requirements. That ends up in the RFP and it further promotes incumbency, because it can be hard to find someone that is PMP, DAWIA III, and CDFM… 10 years ago everyone needed to be Lean 6 Sigma Black belt. When everyone had payed for that cert then PMP became the novel thing. Now everyone wants to be agile trained because Agile is the buzz word of the day. PMP is a hard test and takes effort, but I’ve never met a person where telling me they are a PMP provides any information on how effective they are. The whole certification industry is a racket. I’ve repeatedly joked that I need to create my own new certification to make my million dollar company.
Yes that’s an interesting use of certifications, to basically put on the appearance of open advertisement when in fact it was targeted to a specific company. It seems that certifications are a racket in many ways, and in others ways it looks like it helps with mobility in a world dominated by costly and inflexible higher education.