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Kev M

Kev M

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Seems I may have a made a monumental error in judgement with quite severe financial consequences. I'm in the process of de-mobbing and as such get a bit of time to do some retraining and some money towards courses. I'm an aircraft spanner monkey by trade but have pretty much had my fill of working hard so others can have all the fun and want to move away from the dirty end of engineering into something more managerial. For ages I searched for an appropriate course and found two that seemed pretty much what I was looking for. One was aircraft design and the other was a diploma in engineering management. I looked for a while and went to an open ady for the design course, it seemed perfect the only problem is I'm unlikely to find that type of work in the location we intend on settling in. Then I looked at the diploma and decided I wasn't senior enough at the minute to get through the course. So I was back to square one again and running out of time.

Then I found a course in project management (called PRINCE2) and figured it was the only thing I could find with regards to management so it might come in handy. The pre-course reading arrived last week in the middle of my house move so I've only just got down to it this week. OMFG:eek: what have I let myself in for, this is not the sort of management I'm used to or the type of projects I know anything about. It's reeks of nu-labour speak and job creation and it's not sinking into my tiny sponge of a brain at all.

I'd been chatting about it with a couple of people who had done the course or looked into it on a RAF forum and then tonight I get an email notification of a reply and it's not good news.


Think very carefully before doing Prince2, it is a good course in many ways because all public service departments require their PM's to get the qualification, however they expect them to be PM's first! If you really want to be a PM but have little project experience (real projects with real budgets that can be quantified because that's all the civvie world is interested in) then apply for jobs as a trainee/ junior PM, the money isn't brilliant but you will get experience, you will get qualified and you will become viable in the employment market. If you want to be a trainee PM do the online course for free, this will introduce you to the language and principles therefore help you through the interviews.

If you don't want to work in the public sector then forget Prince2, nobody else uses it! Prince2 is very expensive, there are far better courses to spend both ELC and resettlement on, Prince2 will not get you a job without viable experience even if your mates cousins best mates girlfriend once got a job on £50K a year because of it................. Viable experience specifically requires you to have controlled a project _budget_ and have _managed_ a _project_, not lots of little management tasks which any departmental manager would be expected to do on a day to day basis outside the wire!

Don't be suckered by the hype of Prince2, that being said if you have nothing else you want to do with your ELC you will learn a lot from the course and it may go some way toward showing a future employer some commitment to working in PM.
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It appears that I may well have not only picked the wrong course in my desperation to get any sort of further training but it's not even an easy wrong course, or even a wrong course I have a vague chance of passing. Coupled with the fact I'll be using my valuable training days and meagre allowance towards funding a course I now feel destined to fail before I've even started.

Way to go numbnuts. Just to top it all off, it starts on monday so I doubt I could cancel without costing myself a bomb in the process.







Today, I will mostly be feeling stupid:bonk::shrug::(
 
Seems my idea of a project is a little smaller than what PRINCE2 is all about ad I can't really say Ive even got evxperience of MOD project management.

This sucks.
 
Foundation and practitioner. One of the lads was saying that the practitioner exam has just changed to make it harder. Now you get negative marks for answering a question wrong instead of nil point like it used to be. The prospect of donig project mangement sounds great I'm just starting to realise that it's highly likely I don't have enough background knowledge to even start the course.
 
Hey Kev... PRINCE2 is a good qualification to have - but let me give you some advice if I may - not ALL organisations who have jobs going in Project Management actually ask for this. There is an alternative syllabus you can look into called the PMI - just as good, and often better thought of. PRINCE2 is somewhat over-rated and unnecessary and I bet most of the organisations who ask for this have no real idea what is involved in putting it to use on their projects. It is very thorough and detailed, and I'd say that probably 50% of PRINCE2 is not used in most projects where employers ask that PM's are PRINCE2 certified.

PRINCE2 is used for example, when you want to put a man on the moon, not necessarily if you want to develop and deploy a software system in a smaller organisation.

If I were you, I'd look through some of the job sites on the net for Project Managers / Project Management and read the descriptions of the jobs. I am sure, from what I read in your first post - that you could apply for many of these jobs. Read up about Project Management on the net, read about the 'Project life-cycle' etc - what most businesses are looking for when they advertise for PM's is a high degree of pragmatism, common sense and a professional approach to the most important factor of Project Management i.e. delivery.

At an interview NEVER try to say or imply that all your projects have been delivered on time, to budget and to specification - as if you do, any interviewer will then know you are a liar. Project plans are not cast in stone, and all projects slip in some manner, that's why there are processes such as Change Control and Configuration Management. Be a realist and focus on "starting-doing-delivering". Some people are good starters, some good at the 'doing' or 'getting done', and some (though fewer) are good at finishing... however, quality PM's excel at all of these. They are committed, enthusiastic, dynamic, do not need managing, have an inate ability to get things done, make progress, are super communicators and above all - walk the walk as well as talk the talk - they deliver!!

If you manage to get an interview then my advice is not to say you'd deploy PRINCE2 methodology to the project (depending on it's complexity obviously), but that you'd use those elements of PRINCE2 that would help execute the project and expedite delivery.

How do I know this...? Well this is an area I am most certainly qualified on talkphotography to answer... I have been a Project Manager for nearly 20 years, and more recently as a self employed Project Management consultant. I have worked on projects for BA, Vodafone, MoD (am security cleared), NCR, Publishing businesses, have been a keynote speaker at several sales conferences, and often carry out training sessions for various aspects of the project management life cycle.

Still not very good at photography though :):):)

If you want more info or advice... please feel free to shout.
 
theMusicMan said:
Hey Kev... PRINCE2 is a good qualification to have - but let me give you some advice if I may - not ALL organisations who have jobs going in Project Management actually ask for this. There is an alternative syllabus you can look into called the PMI - just as good, and often better thought of. PRINCE2 is somewhat over-rated and unnecessary and I bet most of the organisations who ask for this have no real idea what is involved in putting it to use on their projects. It is very thorough and detailed, and I'd say that probably 50% of PRINCE2 is not used in most projects where employers ask that PM's are PRINCE2 certified.

PRINCE2 is used for example, when you want to put a man on the moon, not necessarily if you want to develop and deploy a software system in a smaller organisation.

If I were you, I'd look through some of the job sites on the net for Project Managers / Project Management and read the descriptions of the jobs. I am sure, from what I read in your first post - that you could apply for many of these jobs. Read up about Project Management on the net, read about the 'Project life-cycle' etc - what most businesses are looking for when they advertise for PM's is a high degree of pragmatism, common sense and a professional approach to the most important factor of Project Management i.e. delivery.

At an interview NEVER try to say or imply that all your projects have been delivered on time, to budget and to specification - as if you do, any interviewer will then know you are a liar. Project plans are not cast in stone, and all projects slip in some manner, that's why there are processes such as Change Control and Configuration Management. Be a realist and focus on "starting-doing-delivering". Some people are good starters, some good at the 'doing' or 'getting done', and some (though fewer) are good at finishing... however, quality PM's excel at all of these. They are committed, enthusiastic, dynamic, do not need managing, have an inate ability to get things done, make progress, are super communicators and above all - walk the walk as well as talk the talk - they deliver!!

If you manage to get an interview then my advice is not to say you'd deploy PRINCE2 methodology to the project (depending on it's complexity obviously), but that you'd use those elements of PRINCE2 that would help execute the project and expedite delivery.

How do I know this...? Well this is an area I am most certainly qualified on talkphotography to answer... I have been a Project Manager for nearly 20 years, and more recently as a self employed Project Management consultant. I have worked on projects for BA, Vodafone, MoD (am security cleared), NCR, Publishing businesses, have been a keynote speaker at several sales conferences, and often carry out training sessions for various aspects of the project management life cycle.

Still not very good at photography though :):):)

If you want more info or advice... please feel free to shout.
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Absolute fantastic advice, you would pay to receive that type of comment elsewhere.
We should catch up Sir, been a PM for a little while as well :) 10+ years, Although have now moved to the dark side (Product Development) in Cardiff.

Not a truer word said, take from PRINCE what you need and no more, apply the parts and portions to your role and job done.
 
Hey Chewy - many thanks for those comments, much appreciated. I hope Kev finds them useful - and of course anyone else looking into starting a career in Project Management. Having re-read my post, the only thing I should have added that is vital to the success of any project - that of expectation management. But then again, though not explicitly mentioned, I guess this is buried within my comments yeah.

Yes sir I agree - we must have a good catch up sometime - maybe a Cardiff/Newport meet could be sorted who knows.

Nice to make your acquaintance...:) c'mon Wales
 
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