What can PMP do? Not much.

Our HR section sent out a message today with a promising subject line: "Training Opportunity for ALL Personnel."

I like opportunities for professional development, so I opened it up. Sadly, it was about the Project Management Professional certification. This was disappointing, because 1) I'm already PMP certified, and 2) it's really just a waste of time.

By "waste of time," I mean that the benefits of getting and maintaining the PMP credential don't exceed the costs (in most cases). To illustrate, here's the slide that talks about the benefits to both the individual and the Army.

As I looked through each of these bullet points, you'll notice that none of them actually talk about actual benefits to to the Army, nor do they apply to current federal employees.

In my position, for example, I have received no benefit from my PMP certification. I haven't gotten any higher salary, nor have I gotten any different career opportunities. While a 25% higher paycheck *sounds* great, that's only in the private sector -- not the federal employee system.

There there are the costs -- both initial and recurring. There's the opportunity cost of the time you spend studying for the test, and the $400+ fee for the test itself. It's discounted a little if you become a PMI member, but it's still significant.

Then, to maintain certification, you have to invest more time in Professional Development Units. While there are free webinars one can watch online, there's also a "giving back" component that one must fill through some kind of volunteer work.

Part of the problem is that we're just not structured to take advantage of PMP-style talent. In the "Executive's Guide to Disciplined Agile" webinar, the speaker talks use a "race car engine" analogy. Every supervisor wants to have a high-speed race car engine, but race car engines don't do any good when you put them in a tractor. Further, even if you had a race car to put the race car engine in, it doesn't do any good unless you have access to a race track and a proper maintenance team.

In short, unless the system itself is designed to take advantage of talent, having talent is pointless.

By promoting talent in a system that doesn't reward it and can't take advantage of it, our HR section is, unwittingly, incentivizing us to go work somewhere else.