PMI PathPro

Our Newest Tool Helps Organizations to Identify Needed Skills and Create Career Paths

While organizations today understand the need to find the right people and keep turnover low, too few provide their employees a track for moving up.

According to PMI research, only 30 percent of organizations have defined career paths for project managers. Only 31 percent have a career path to guide their project managers’ development, even though organizational leaders believe that project management is crucial to success.

In response, PMI launched career framework, a knowledge base of job descriptions in the project management discipline.

The framework provides the tools and resources necessary to identify employee strengths and weaknesses and implement a project management career ladder.

Going one step further, we launched PathPro^® as the online delivery of career framework. Pathpro is a tool that organizations can tailor to meet their specific needs, to address different steps in the project process and different roles.

PathPro can also aggregate data of all the skill assessments employees perform to help organizations identify areas that need improvement.

One of the tool's biggest users, São Paulo, Brazil-based CPM Braxis, is the largest IT services company in Brazil, but has its sights set on becoming one of the top 10 global IT companies. And they believe the way to make that list is by developing the best project managers.

"Project managers are critical to the success of CPM Braxis," says Marcus Vinicius Villalobos Mendes, CPM Braxis. "If we don't have very good and capable project managers, we won't reach our goals."

The company made the investment in PathPro to provide project managers with the best way to develop their careers and link the platform with the mission of the company.

PathPro is for Practitioners, Too

PMI members and credential holders can also use a practitioner version of the tool. It allows end-users to view sample job descriptions and assess themselves against those job descriptions.

Marisa Benson, manager of academic communities, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, first signed up for PMI's PathPro to work on her individual development as a project manager.

Going forward, Ms. Benson says her organization also plans to make an investment in PathPro.

"The University Technology Services division will use these as a basis for new job families and descriptions, career paths, and one of the steps in bi-annual evaluations," she says.