Is Project Management Still a Portable Career?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

 

Traditionally, if you are a project manager, then you have the ability to enjoy a pretty diverse career if that is what you want. Project management as a discipline allows someone to move companies, and even industries, reasonably easily because it is applied consistently across those companies and industries.

There are exceptions—large-scale engineering and construction projects need specialized knowledge and certifications for example. But in most cases, PMs can move with a high degree of freedom.

Economic cycles can make that more challenging at times, as can any mandates requiring in-person work. The flip side of that is that remote work and economic boom times make it even more straightforward.

But now, the profession is evolving in such a way that I wonder whether that relative freedom of movement is going to remain.

A shift in understanding
At the heart of the portability of project management has always been the fact that a PM could practice their project management skills in multiple different environments without too much variation. Put simply, an operational improvement project for a bank was not vastly dissimilar from a product development initiative in the fast-moving consumer products sector.

But now, that bank PM is expected to understand how the operations are executed, where the bottlenecks are, where privacy and risk concerns are …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.