The Biggest Barrier to PM Career Progress

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 lot of people contact me looking for help in their careers. Sometimes it’s a simple piece of guidance that is easy to provide, but many times it is people who feel that they can’t move into project management—or can’t progress from a junior role without my assistance. (I regularly get emails along the lines of, “I really need you to help me get started in project management.”)

When you step back and think about it, it makes no sense. I don’t know these people, and they don’t know me. I don’t work in their countries or regions, and I have no idea how capable they are at managing work or people.

It's easy to discount these communications, but I can’t help wondering what it is that makes people feel that they have to reach out to me (and to other people in the project management space who have a similar profile) for help. They must know that they are clutching at straws, but why do they believe that’s their best (or only) option?

Some of it has to do with the region of the world that some of these people are in. Not every country values project management as a career—and even in some that do, it’s seen as only applicable to certain industries.

But a lot of it is down to inaccurate perceptions of what it takes to become a project manager, and that’s what I want to explore here. As …

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