Greetings All,
I am making a career change to Project Management from working as a Program Coordinator at a local university. I led and oversaw several tasks, projects, programs, and initiatives during my 6 years of professional work, but I am not certain which ones would exactly meet PMI's criteria as "experience" on the PMP certification application. Can you please provide me with feedback on the following or share your experiences if you have applied for PMP using past professional experience from working in a university or educational environment?
I have a couple of examples that are very clearly and inarguably identifiable as "projects" that I could use, like my role in the purchase, set up, training, and launch of our department's new software system, and can probably cover the months of experience requirement. However, it may require I make numerous entries and thus mean having to write lots of descriptions out.... I am wondering if it might be easier/quicker to fill out the application with something more like the following example below? I would enter each semester as a separate project, but use a copy/paste approach of the description with minor alterations on the details (ex. # of employees, dollar amounts of budget, etc.):
For example, I ran a certain program every semester that I think might be able to be viewed as a project. It required budgeting, planning, executing, hiring workers, and working with campus partners/teams, etc. each and every semester. The start and end dates were very clear identifying it was not ongoing, but is time bound (only lasts first day- last day of each semester). I think it can fall under project because every semester things changed- we changed which students benefited/were served, who was hired as employees to provide services for the students, we worked with different faculty members, we changed our satisfaction surveys and how we measured our success, etc. However, my role as the leader was always consistent (ex. I ran communications with the various parties, formed policies, set timelines & goals, made budget predictions and reports, etc.).
Thanks in advance for your responses,
Jack
Community Champion
