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Asia Pacific Europe, Middle East and Africa Latin America North America Extra Credit Earning the required Professional Development Units to maintain your Project Management Professional credential can be a natural educational fit instead of a chore. Upward Trend What’s behind the trend toward Project Management Professional certification, and why do companies like Procter & Gamble and Atrion put so much stock in its holders? PMI offers its appreciation to the International Institute for Learning Inc. for its sponsorship of PMP® Passport through the end of 2006.

Extra Credit

Earning the required Professional Development Units to maintain your Project Management Professional credential can be a natural educational fit instead of a chore.

by Suzanne Young

Some holders of the Project Management Professional (PMP®) credential seem to have a knack for turning appropriate special things they’re doing at work and in their personal lives into Professional Development Units (PDUs). Others wonder which activities beyond the usual courses qualify to earn PDUs.

The bottom line for earning the required 60 per three-year cycle: You must expand or share your professional project management knowledge. While formal coursework is the foundation of earning PDUs, there are other everyday opportunities that qualify.

Perhaps the question most often fielded by Tom Bates, PMI’s Certification Standards Supervisor, has to do with qualifying activities at work. “Members often think that because they’ve managed a special project or developed a new methodology, for example, it will earn PDUs. Not so,” Mr. Bates says. “That falls under the heading of work.”

Working a minimum of 1,500 hours in project management services automatically earns five PDUs each year. “But, publish that methodology in a qualifying publication and it earns PDUs,” Mr. Bates says. Qualifying publications include scholarly journals or industry-specific magazines available to a wider audience. Internal company publications don’t qualify because of their limited distribution.

Take that same methodology and create a teaching curriculum for other project managers and that additional effort will earn you more PDUs. For example, Tiffany Sossei, PMP, a program manager in the project management office in Home Depot’s corporate office in Atlanta, Ga., USA, earned PDUs for designing and conducting training courses for testing and business requirements that she developed during her tenure with a previous employer. “The PDUs add up,” she says.

Beneficial Bonds
Signing up for a PMI-approved mentorship program through his local chapter was a natural way for Joe Bala, PMP, to combine his personal career goals with earning PDUs. Mr. Bala, a Toronto, Canada-based independent project manager, hoped to improve his own skills and have a sounding board for day-to-day work issues. Not insignificantly, the mentorship program accumulates 48 PDUs a year for both mentor and protégé.

Mr. Bala’s mentors helped him make the career switch to independent contractor status and to decide to pursue an MBA—another challenging but worthwhile opportunity to earn PDUs while furthering a career. “The nature of project management gives you a lot of control over your time,” he says. “It will be a very challenging year, but I feel I’m well prepared for success.”

PMI recognizes formalized mentoring programs through chapters or Specific Interest Groups (SIGs), but does not recognize internal company mentoring programs because of the significant challenge to monitor such programs globally.

Kirsten Schrader, PMP

A Worthy Cause
Look toward your own passions, advises Ms. Sossei, who earned PDUs for organizing and overseeing a drive for donations for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged parts of the U.S. Gulf Coast. “You can use project management skills almost anywhere—organizing fundraising events for a charity.” The key: For volunteer activities, the provider has to be a recognized charity or community organization.

For Ms. Sossei, this wasn’t the first time her personal interests earned PDUs. After a first-hand experience with a flawed and traumatic process when adopting a puppy, she contacted Atlanta’s Humane Society to volunteer to standardize the intake and adoption process for puppies in the shelter’s Atlanta and Cobb County offices. “I wanted to make a difference for other animals,” she says. “I didn’t go there to earn PDUs, but after I was finished, I wrote it up and got credit for it.”

Kirsten Schrader, PMP, supports her daughter’s activities in the Girl Scouts, which helps her to balance work and family obligations while earning PDUs. A senior manager at Fannie Mae, Washington, D.C., USA, Ms. Schrader serves as leader for the Montgomery Village, Md., USA, GSCNC Troop. She orchestrates the activities of Junior Troop 1217’s special event managers, as well as badge activities for the troop’s 22 girls and two co-leaders. “It is a big undertaking—I do over 100 hours every year in coordination efforts,” she says.

Mr. Bates said members frequently earn PDUs through project management-based volunteer activities that use building planning or layout planning skills, such as helping a church or community organization with a building expansion. Similar work with organizations like Habitat for Humanity, through which volunteers build houses in impoverished communities around the world, also qualifies for PDUs.

David Davis, PMP

Volunteer for Success
David Davis, PMP, seems to have an inner magnet for attracting PDUs—and that ability comes from his interest in leading the profession. He chairs the eBusiness Specific Interest Group (EBSIG), was the charter sponsor of PMI’s Western Lake Erie Chapter and is active in the PMI Project Management Office and Leadership SIGs. “I have a passion for it,” he says.

A published writer, Mr. Davis has authored articles and delivered presentations at congresses and other professional conferences. He also edits the EBSIG quarterly newsletter. His advice: To create a presentation or write an article for publication, start by brainstorming on your expertise. What lessons learned do you have to share? What best practices have you uncovered beyond what’s commonly accepted in the business community? But keep in mind, while publishing an article may be a personal goal, you’ll have to ensure that the target publication meets the PDU criteria—contact PMI to be sure.

“Not everyone wants to publish papers,” says Cathryn Chee, managing director of IIL Asia in Singapore. “Another way to earn PDUs is by contributing service to your Chapter, in activities such as conducting focus groups.” Her chapter regularly arranges for PMPs to conduct two- to three-hour teaching sessions with PMP candidates pursuing a self-study program, earning PDUs for the instructors.

Cathryn Chee

The self-study program, Mr. Bates says, may be one of the most overlooked ways of earning PDUs. Rather than a project, it is purely study. For example, if you want to brush up your skills on a topic such as risk mitigation, the self-study program enables you to create your own educational curriculum.

“You have to do your own due diligence,” he says. Individuals assemble their own study components such as professional-level articles and books, interviewing subject matter experts, and study lessons on CD. This method of increasing your knowledge base earns a maximum of 15 PDUs per cycle. “If you’re coming up to the end of a cycle and still need some PDUs, this is one to consider,” he says.

Inventing Opportunities
When Mr. Davis was looking for an eBusiness degree program for himself as well as to recommend to members of the EBSIG, he found many programs lacked substance.

Along with Mark Wientjes, who heads professional development for the EBSIG, Mr. Davis was instrumental in helping the University of British Columbia (UBC) revamp two existing programs—an online degree in eBusiness and a separate program in project management—into a single, online graduate-level program, which can earn certificants PDUs.

Mr. Davis will receive two credentials from UBC in 2006: an eBusiness Project Management Achievement Award and a Master's Certificate in Business Analysis and Project Management. Mr. Davis’ day job—yes, he has one—is program manager for AT&T, implementing application-to-application integration. His master’s thesis, a white paper on a testing process that was developed with the input of his UBC instructors, has become an important tool in the implementation process with new clients.

Because he works in a virtual office—he lives and works in Sylvania, Ohio, USA—he uses the Internet to his advantage. “I don’t have commute time, so I’m able to do a lot of things online and at off-peak hours,” he says. “That helps a lot.” Occasionally, he has been able to build family vacations around some of the conferences where he is a presenter.

As many PMPs have discovered, following your interests and passions both on and off the job can lead to PDUs as well as rewards for your company, your meaningful professional development and your community.

Suzanne Young is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and Forward, among others. She is the author of the forthcoming Beyond Engineering: How to Work on a Team.

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