APM Training Aids Career Change To Project Manager

Alex used APM training to make a career change from Programmer to Project Manager

Alex had been working in the IT industry for the previous four years, working his way up from a programmer to a team leader. He was considering whether to take on a junior project management role.

"At this point in my career I felt I had reached a choice; either continue in a highly technical role, or move across into the management of technical people and projects. I had been working for a great project manager who had delegated some of his tasks to me (mainly progress monitoring, reporting and quality planning), and I felt that this alternative role might be where my strengths lay. What I needed was a training course to show me the full extent of a project manager’s role, so that I could be more informed about my decision."

Alex selected an APM Introductory Certificate workshop, on the basis that a two-day introductory course would not be too expensive, but it also had the added value of a qualification, assuming that he passed the exam.

"I felt I wanted to test myself; if I had failed the exam then that would have helped me to make my decision. As it happened, I passed easily. The course covered about half of the topics in the APM Body of Knowledge – the APM’s ‘bible’ representing the key topics a project manager should be able to use. The bits I enjoyed most were the planning exercises where we calculated the critical path of the project, and the people management sections. Working as I do in an IT supply situation, the concept of a project having a business case was alien to me, but it all made sense once the trainer had explained it."

This gave Alex the confidence to take on the junior project management role. This meant working on a large, complex project under the supervision of a senior project manager.

"Gaining some more practical experience of project management was vital in my long term aim to gain the APMP qualification. You couldn’t really attend the course and take the APMP exam without some real experience to build on. Until you’ve grappled with a planning tool like MS-Project or Primavera, or tried to reconcile your project costs against management reports, you don’t really appreciate how to set things up properly to make best use of your time."

Alex attended an APMP workshop one year after his APM Introductory Certificate course.

"The workshop was a week long, followed by an exam revision day and the exam itself. During the week we covered 37 topics out of the APM Body of Knowledge, obviously in much more detail than the introductory certificate and we used more case studies and exercises. I felt that I learnt a lot from the syndicate exercises we did. I enjoyed some of the topics I hadn’t met before in a formal environment, but had actually done some of these in real life, such as procurement and cost management.

"The exam was quite tough, but a fair representation of the things a project manager needs to know and be able to apply. Passing it has given me the confidence to ask for a pay rise! But overall I feel I have a baseline structure of how to do things properly. It’s turned me from a re-active project manager to a pro-active one."