Top Five Reasons to Help Others

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Career Development  

They say kindness is its own reward, but when it comes to work and work skills we often have tunnel vision and decide to only use those hard-earned skills and knowledge to make a living; our precious time is money, after all.

For project managers though, helping others with your expertise can be a very rewarding experience. Helping others is not just for project managers with 20 or 30 years of experience, either; anyone at any stage can get involved in helping others and paying it forward. And if you needed any additional incentive, here are the top five reasons to help others by using your PM skills:

1. Earn PDUs. You may not be aware of this, but volunteer service can give you PDUs toward recertification with the Project Management Institute. These PDUs are category E and count toward the 45-hour maximum in the three “Giving Back to the Profession” categories (D, E and F). There are several ways to do this. You can volunteer in your local PMI chapter or do some work for a non-profit or charitable organization. You can even become a coach or mentor on the various project management topics to earn PDUs in this category. By reporting this work to PMI, you can earn one hour for every hour of volunteer (which is to say, non-compensated) service.

2. Learn something. One of the best things about helping others is that you can often learn quite a lot …

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