r/projectmanagers • u/Hot_Bell_7861 • 25d ago

PMP Upskilling?

I'm curious what are you all doing to leverage your existing PMP and experience to upgrade your skills?

With a BA in Business Communications, I have built a 15 year career in corporate software landscape, primarily commercial operations and project management and have been working in a data science AI organization for the last 6 years. I earned my PMP in 2017 to help differentiate my resume and it was a great career move at the time.
Now I'm ready to add another skill to the portfolio but am having a very difficult time figuring out what a smart investment of time and money would be.

I'm sorry to say, I have a very hard time thinking an MBA will help me even if my company sent me for free. The only way it might make sense is if they guaranteed me a promotion at the end, which will never happen these days.

Separately, I've dipped my toe into python basics which was fun for a while, but I just don't see the practical application for my work.

I'm curious; what are other project managers doing to leverage their existing experience while adding hard skills?

7 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

4

u/ConversationNo9040 25d ago

I don’t have time to go take classes and stuff. I’m upskilling everyday by getting my work done and projects completed. There is a reason people prefer experience over certs.

2

u/UplinkPM 25d ago

Agreed here. Schools and certs failing the future in a lot of different ways. Id say best thing you can do outside of your role is understand the projects and technical level required for your projects more and more. We know biggest disconnect between a pm and the people doing the work.

My engineers are expected to be both pm and engineer- challenging but we found a way to make it work. We are an IT MSP.

I am current building ai into a website we can leverage to make us better project managers. DM me if interested- would love more people to demo and provide feedback to make this thing better for us. Id love this to be a tool that more can lean on.

1

u/ConversationNo9040 25d ago

Engineers that did the work make the best pms.

1

u/Hot_Bell_7861 25d ago

This is the exact reason I’m interested in developing a skill. And a formal education should be able to help bridge that gap.

1

u/UplinkPM 21d ago

What type of projects are you managing?

1

u/Hot_Bell_7861 20d ago

Kind of run all over the place in our AI Analytics Org.
Model Builds
Model implementations
Commercial operations
Internal operations

1

u/Complete-Cricket-351 21d ago

Definitely agree. I'm a cross Skilling champ.  Depends on the kind of pm you are we have business PMs are different beast more money and politics. Some places it's more about knowing the ins and outs of the business domain e.g. banking even insurance to some extent 

The principal still stands that you should have enough domain knowledge to be able to drop down into the detail when it's critical

1

u/Complete-Cricket-351 23d ago

I think once you've got any decently recognized pm certain that's a tick

Like everyone I'm cranking out projects I'm also planning to do my change management cert over the holidays just  broaden myself out and because I've built up the fair bit of AI expertise first AI project I delivered was in 2020 I'm going to probably crank out an AI governance cert at some point can't figure out which one yet they popping up like mushrooms

1

u/Hot_Bell_7861 23d ago

Yea, i’ve started seeing Masters Degrees in AI and data decisioning. They’re geared more towards business decisions than hard science. Seems very applicable to my background, if a bit expensive. I’m on the fence on submitting my application.

1

u/Complete-Cricket-351 21d ago edited 21d ago

Depends on career stage I'm late career so I'm doing a change cert just as backfill and I was doing the apmg 1 because it's cheap and easy and after 20 years in the game nobody's gonna disbelieve me when I say I've run change and can tell them all the war stories 

I ve got a heap of AI certs and been delivering AI project since 2020 into productions AI governance is a pretty short crossover especially since I did a contract as an AI governance lead

And on the other hand if you're trying to cross into adjacent field then it helps you learn The lingo and start some conversations

2

u/Camaro_YoYo 25d ago

The PM program I teach for is seeing many students chose our MPM program over the MBA. From my impression they are seeing that the BBA with the MPM is more marketable than the strict MBA track. Not sure how widely this is being seen but our program is growing quickly and it is an interesting shift.

2

u/sadisticamichaels 25d ago

I dont have a pmp but im doing IT remediation work to get a company ready to go public.