Project Management is a top trending profession, yes but...

According to a study by the Project Management Institute, between 2010 and 2020, 15.7 million new project management roles will be created globally, and the project management industry is slated to grow by $6.61 trillion. An expected 12% growth in demand for project management professionals will result in almost 6.2 million jobs by 2020. These figures by PMI show Project management is a top trending profession.

Nowadays there are over 700,000 certified professionals and almost 500,000 PMI members. This huge professional network has its social meeting points in the form of congresses, seminars, webinars, etc., many of them organized by PMI Inc. or its nearly 300 PMI chapters in more than 100 countries. Many PMI chapters sponsor volunteering projects.

In social networks like LinkedIn you can find many groups of interests related to PMI and project management in general, accessing many different roles such as students, teachers, project managers, program managers, portfolio managers, PMO members, project sponsors, education institutions, authors, project management tool vendors, etc.

If you are a project manager, then you will probably know that you can get an extra money from training and consulting.

The bad news is that, as you may expect in any growing industry, there are some inefficiency causes, including but not limited to:

1. Training offering is centralized by education institutions, business schools, universities and consulting firms. Consequently, the offering is restrained, courses are expensive, and teacher fees are low. On the other hand, teachers do not need to be employees: they usually work as independent contractors, course by course, suffering a strong competition.
2. Project managers do not have quite chances to manage projects out of the organization they work for. They can only learn and improve their project management knowledge practicing business as usual, or taking internal courses, but they lack true opportunities to learn managing more different projects.
3. Consulting offering to improve project management processes, organize the portfolio, setting up the PMO, etc., is usually biased towards a PPM tool implementation, before even knowing if a tool is really needed. This produces inefficiency and waste: tool users not using quite a few features; tool vendors wasting investments in selling activities; big transformation projects getting nowhere, etc.

Do you agree? Have you noticed another issues? I will appreciate any contribution, please. Thank you!

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