Are You A Professional?

  Career Development   New Practitioners   ProjectsAtWork  

Is project management a profession? If not, should it be? And what would differentiate a professional PM from all the others managing projects? In this article, we explore what constitutes a profession, and whether project management should be considered one.

Project Management — it has been alternately described as a discipline, a career, a skillset, a subset of management, a set of processes, and a profession. But what is it really, or better yet, what should it be?

In the UK, the Association of Project Management is currently pursuing Chartered status through the UK Privy Council. This is the equivalent of a license in the United States — the formal recognition of a legal profession. This has raised the long-debated question within the PM community: Is project management a profession?

Before we can answer that, we first have to discuss what a profession is. Some view a profession as something that requires both education and training; others see a profession as simply one’s chosen career, while still others use the definition of “I get paid for it, therefore I’m a professional.”

Currently there is no single, agreed upon definition of a profession. The closest to a legal definition seems to include a combination of three requirements: a) a fiduciary responsibility to the Owner/Client; b) a responsibility for the welfare or …

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