Where Does the PM Career Path End?

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.

  Career Development  

A friend of mine turned 50 recently and it caused him to take stock of his career--what he had achieved and what he still had the opportunity to achieve in the years remaining in his working life. He had been a project manager for quite some years, taking on increasingly large and complex projects--but he now felt that he needed to move away from project management if he wanted to continue advancing his career.

In this article, I want to explore that concept--is there a point where you “run out of places to go” in project management and need to move on, or is there the potential to be challenged for life within the PM discipline?

What do you want from your career?
I think that the heart of this issue comes down to what “career advancement” means to each person. If we are ambitious, then early on in our career we can gain fairly rapid advancement in terms of job title, salary, etc. We can measure success in terms of when we first got a job that had business cards and when we first got an office rather than a cubicle. These are all very tangible measures and there’s nothing wrong with them, but they can be restrictive if they are the only score sheet that we use.

If we feel that we have to keep gaining a new job title to be making progress in our careers, then project management is eventually going to run out of things to satisfy us.…

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