How to claim your PM experience?

Submitted by lupis on Mon, 01/28/2013 - 00:28

 Hi everyone,

When people ask you how many years of project management experience do you have?

What do you answer??

I believe not very many project managers in the world started thier careers as Project Manager.

I guess it depends on the industry, but with Engineering/Construction world that I've been for 20 years, regardless of my title, I was always in the "project-based" environment, requiring a lot of coordination if not "managing" projects.

When I worked for a small builder, my position was a "sales", but I was involved from chasing leads from material take-off, coordinating with designers, suppliers, customers, etc. ordering materials, handling logistis..... obviously "managing" the projects. But there were no positions called "project managers".

I was told that with my PMP application, you can include those hours as long as you worked in a project.

So my quesion is - can you count all those years?

In engineering world, a lot of engineers going towards PM direction, they start as a Project Engineer - coordination technical aspects of the projects. Do you count those experience as Project Management experience?

I hope it won't be the case that you are only entiltled to count years if you had an official title as "Project Manager" being responsible for the entire proejcts in regards of the PMI knowlege areas.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks. 

 

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admin

Mon, 01/28/2013 - 03:41

Your designation is not important, its the number of hours you spend on Project management related activities , which is what you report in your PM experience in your PMP form.

Hope that clarifies

lupis

Tue, 01/29/2013 - 04:06

 The question was not for the PM experience for the PMP application.

I've just passed PMP, but my employer is asking me how many years of PM experience I have in total?

That's when I have trouble counting my experience years. Shoud I just follow the same way with PMP application?

I believe I have at least 8 years of experience in managing proejcts.

In addition to that, I always had a coordinating role, so if that counts, that would be additional 7 years.

Yet, even with PMP, my title is still Jr. Project Manager, so I just want to know what's the average years of experience for Jr. Intermediate and Sr PM should have.

Thanks!

 

admin's picture

admin

Tue, 01/29/2013 - 06:03

Jr. in my opinion is  to 1 to 3 years , intermidiate is 3 to 6 years and beyond that is a Sr. PM. Ofcourse the definition will depend on the geography you are in.

More important that number of years of experience is the fact that how many million USD project you can deliver independently or have delivered in past

A person who has delivered 10 mi USD project is much more valueable to me than someone who has delivered 5 , two million project. Since the complexity increases with Size and most organizations value that.

lupis

Tue, 01/29/2013 - 07:08

Thanks for the reply.

I see. That's an interesting comment. My projects I've been involved are pretty small - $50K to $300K.

I'd love to get more experience in bigger proejcts but it's not gonna happen with my current employer. What do you recommend for me fill the gaps if I want to move to a bigger company who deals with bigger projects?

e.g. software skills, since in a small company, we don't even have a PM software.

Please advise.

 

admin's picture

admin

Thu, 01/31/2013 - 01:50

PMs generally have to bring their own flavor , like you said if you have good software skills in using MS Project or other similar PMIS , it will be advantage, You can find your strengths and then play then to move ahead in your career.