Top 10 reasons why you should become PRINCE2® qualified

It does not matter if you’re already a practicing project manager or someone aspiring to become one, being PRINCE2® qualified is an essential step in enhancing your career prospects.

Here are our top 10 reasons why PRINCE2 can really supercharge your career.

1. It’s a Global Industry Standard
PRINCE2® was originally developed by the CCTA (the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency) a department of the UK Government in attempt to reduce its high project failure rates. Since then PRINCE2® has been endorsed by many other governments such as Australia. It is also important to mention that some years back the total numbers of qualified PRINCE2® Practitioners Worldwide passed the 1.2 million mark embedding PRINCE2® as a truly defacto project management standard. Other Project Management qualifications /Institutes can only dream of attaining memberships of this size.

The only country where PRINCE2® has challenging competition is the US where the PMI qualification is more popular due mainly to the fact that PMI includes Earned Value Techniques as part of its method which is essential if you are to work on Federal related Projects. It is worth pointing out that both PRINCE2 and the PMI qualifications are entirely compatible with neither trying to reinvent the wheel.

2. You will become more employable
Last year through partnership with the Department of Work and pensions we (Balance Global) took over 1500 unemployed people and helped them get qualified in PRINCE2®. Our stats show that 52% of them got back into work within 3 months of training with us. There was a broad geographical spread (Yorkshire to South Coast) and although some of these people would undoubtedly have found work without PRINCE2, many used it to springboard into new Project Managment careers. Of the 52% who found work we had evidenced proof that 94% of those were still in work 6 months later.

Futhermore, whereever you look Recruitment Agencies and Job boards now have pre-screening questionnaires for Project Management related work with PRINCE2® Accreditation as one of the top questions. Fail to answer this correctly and your CV will never reach anyone.

If you want to enhance your management career this is one of the best qualifications you can take, with many study options and costings to suit every pocket. So no excuse not to get started with this important accreditation.

3. You’ll earn more money
Through our work helping the unemployed back to work a recent survey of those who successfully found work with their new PRINCE2 accreditation the average salaries paid were between £32,000 and £62,000 per annum.

4. Increased chance of project success
Currently the CHAOS survey shows that more the 70% of IT projects fail each year in terms of budget, time and cost. This means that whatever you start a new project it’s going to be a challenge to beat this industrial average. Certainly part of the “secret sauce” required to buck this unhappy trend is the need to adopt and implement best practice project management methods such as PRINCE2®.

I have lost count of the number of independent Project Audit reports I have read over the years where the Project Manager was blamed and ultimately sacked for project failure. The reasons commonly cited for removal of the project manager was failure to follow best practice, even though the real cause of poor delivery was more related to a lack of good project sponsorship. In my view being PRINCE2® accredited and following Best Practice Methods can give you degree of “Teflon coating” when the blame is being shared out.

5. Increased project sales
Very often being a successful project manager in a consultancy or software house is dependent on good relations with the Business Development team. When developing project proposals many clients will be keener to engage software development work where they see that the Project Manager is PRINCE2® qualified and has structured the delivery aspects of the proposal with an eye on the use of PRINCE2® methods, reducing the project risks for the potential client.

6. Work on larger projects
Many organisations with large project team’s grade project managers on the size of the project (budget size or staff count) that they can be trusted to manage. Typically a formula is arrived at for calculating this grading, and one of the key factors in achieving a high score and getting allocated the juiciest projects is your level of project and programme management accreditation.

7. Project Management will be less stressful.
I think we can all agree that project management methods, and thus accreditation, may not be needed when trying to deliver small projects. Small projects can be successful with just strong team leadership, energy and the engagement of good staff.

However, as projects increase in size the complexity of tasks needing to be managed, the range of risks, issues and numbers of resource conflicts encountered can quickly become overwhelming. This can impact your working hours with more of this time being consumed servicing your email inbox to a point where it is common for such project managers to be working 7 days a weeks and still not being effective control of their project. This  situaiton can feel like your project is akin to being strapped to an unguided missle with the addtional untrue perception by stakeholders you are responsible for everyone and everything in the event of project failure or success.

This can be very very stressful.

The adoption of PRINCE2® can maximuse control and increase your chances of project success by letting the process drive delivery, sharing project ownership through better governance and bottom up planning and prevent delivery barriers through risk and issue managment cornerstones of the PRINCE2 methodology.

8. Better project estimation.
Typically non-accredited Project Managers, unaware of PRINCE2®, tend to estimate projects using Top Down approach rather than Bottom Up (only using project staff driven effort and task estimates) and fail to understand the assumptions, risks and issues facing their project and applying appropriate levels of contingency in terms of delivery dates and costings.

9. Foundation for learning how to manage programmes
If you have ambitions to advance your career into Programme Management you have much lower chance of understanding Programme Management methods, such as MSP (managing successful programmes), without a solid grounding in PRINCE2 project management methods first. It would be very hard to gain the respect of a project management team if you are unable to deliver mentor level support and guidance through first-hand knowledge and experience of implementing PRINCE2® in the past.

10. Ability to manage ANY PROJECT
Very often you see project management job vacancies requesting a huge range of skills and qualifications other than PRINCE2® in an attempt to ensure that the hired project manager is more technically skilled than anyone engaged the assigned project team. This idea by HR departments that unless you have done someone’s job you can’t hope to manage them effectively and deliver project success is in our view plainly wrong!

Project manager and programme managers of significant building /engineering projects, such as the Shard in London cannot be “all in one” air-conditioning experts, bricklayers, plumbers and structural engineers. Using structured project and programme management best practices such as PRINCE2® allowing the project and programme management team to manage team to successful delivery the Shard with very little hands on experience of the tasks the engaged project workers had to undertake.

PRINCE2® is truely and established go anyway run any project management methodology.

So if you’re not already PRINCE2® qualified then why not try out our FREE PRINCE2 demo course here!