New technologies, concepts, and Web 2.0 tools are popping up everywhere. How can you use them to help your project team collaborate, communicate - or just give your project an extra boost? [Contact Dave]
Situation: You love obscure facts about Project Management.
Oddly enough, we get asked this a lot. However there aren't a lot of good numbers to go by. PMI estimates that there 16.5 million Project Managers in the world. Both PMI and Gantthead have relationships with a bit more than 600K each, with roughly a 13% overlap. 66.8% of PMI members are based in North America. 53.9% of gantthead members are based in North America. So that implies that there may be 8.7M-11M Project Managers in North America.
Of course, these percentages shrink every year as the industry (and everything else in the world) becomes more global - but that's our "guesstimate".
I find this very interesting. I think that certification in North America is becoming more and more important. As our workforce becomes more and more professionalized, certifcation stops being a means to differentiate and becomes the requirement. We are already seeing PMP as a requirement in some government contracts.
With an approximate US and Canada population of 336M, that implies at the high end PMs make up roughly 3% of the population. That doesn't take into account just working age.
I'd be interested to know how the studies define 'project manager'. Is it by professional body membership? Job adverts with the words 'project manager' in? PMI and Gantthead both have relationships with people who may not be working as project managers, so have they been taken out of the numbers? This is such a hard thing to work out.
Why is this number so different from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which indicates there are 750,000 project manager roles in the US?
There's a major gap between lower end of the estimate of 8.5 mm project managers in North America (of which the US is by far the largest country by population). So either PMI or BLS is wrong. My guess is both are but the large gap is disconcerning.
