There are different project management certificates you should look into. One of them is definitely PMP (Project Management Professional). PMP is offered by Project Management institute (PMI) . According to wikipedia there are currently just over 350 000 PMP certified individuals globally.

In order to obtain PMP, you must document 3 or 5 years of work experience as a project manager, you must complete 35 hours of project management related training and you must complete PMI’s multiple choice examination.

Another certification you might want to look at is PRINCE2 certificate. PRINCE2 is a project management method – PRojects IN Controlled Environments and this method is currently de facto standard for project management in the UK. Compared to PMP Prince2 is a general framework for successful project management while PMP is more about specific techniques.

Some reasons why you might want to consider obtaining project management certifications:

• You get recognised for your knowledge throughout the credentialing process
• Your certificates show your potential employers your dedication to the project management profession
• They reflect your knowledge. Instead of just trying to get the potential employer to take your word on it – you have something to show them.
• Certifications often result in higher wages.
• Getting certified is not as simple as taking an exam – you need to learn for them first and this learning (often maybe just reminding you the things you had forgotten) always has its own benefits.
• Certificates tend to make employers put more trust you, your knowledge and your skills.

By the end of the day – project management certificates give you better understanding of the profession, gives newbies more information on what the employers might be expecting from them, give professionals better dollar numbers and makes your peers think more of you.

In addition to having the general management skills, there’s a lot of other knowledge you might need. Plus the exact skills required depend on the specific project you are working on.

Creativity
You  need to be creative. Most of us can do things by the book, but doing things by the book or being able to do things according to the specific project needs separates a great project manager from just a competent one.

Leadership
You need to be an inspiring leader, you need to be able to lead by example. You need to have the required respect of the team members to successfully get the project done.

Thinking on the go
You need to be able to make fast decision, you need to be able to analyse what’s happening, you need to be able to understand what’s happening and react to it if necessary.

Decision making
You need to be able to make decisions. It’s part of great leadership skills. Being able to make decisions based on intuition is as important as making the decisions based on facts. And you need to be able to stick to the decisions, even though not always might your team members like it.

Communication
As a team leader you are also in charge of the PR department. The ability to keep the peace within the team, the ability to explain people complex things in easy manner – it’s all extremely important. You need to be capable of communicating clearly and regularly. And instead of creating problems with your statements, you need to be able to solve problems or better avoid them at all.

Knowledge
Projects are different, not always can a project manager be an expert in everything. But the project manager does have to know where to find the expert to help him if he needs help, and he needs to know where to find the information he doesn’t know himself. In today’s words new information comes in every day. And often, the most important skill of a project manager is really not knowing it all himself but having the knowledge of where he can find it.

Friend
While a project manager needs to have some kind of authority among his team, he must stay a human being. Leading with power you have in your hands instead of leading with your great personality is not the way to go.

Time management
If you want to get your team to stick to deadlines, you need to be great at time management yourself. Additionally, you need to be able to manage time effectively – your and your teams.

Flexibility
Nobody likes unexpected changes but as life itself is not predictable, your project often changes as well. Be it thanks to the client who changes his mind, or be it a member of your team who needs to take a break to visit his dying father. You need to be able to cope with it. Not letting the team member take a break makes you an arse as a human being and not being able to replace the person makes you a bad project manager.

Human resources
One of the first steps when starting with a project, you need to be able to put together a great team. You need to know what skills you need and you need to be able to put together the team with required skills and knowledge.

These are just some skills and characteristics you must possess as a good project manager.

PMP (PMI Project management professional)
PMP is a certification offered by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the holders of this certification have on average the highest paying jobs in the industry (around $100k annually).  PMP has been created to demonstrate a strong level of project management leadership skills.

CAMP
Another certifications offered by PMI. The CAPM certification is mainly meant for project team members designed specifically for project team members.

Project+
Project+ is a project management certification offered by Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA). The CompTIA Project+ certification is globally recognised and validates your skills of fundamental project management. It is meant to identify quality project managers. CompTIA Project+ is relatively inexpensive and not as sophisticated project management certification than some of the others.

APMC (Advanced Project Management Certification)
APMC is especially meant for senior project managers. This program focuses on widening the project managers knowledge of high level strategic project management.

PRINCE2
The name means PRojects IN Controlled Environments (Prince2) and is currently de facto standard for project management in the UK. Used a lot in private sector both in UK and around the globe. In order to keep their certification, project managers are expected to re-take the exam every 3-5 years.

AIPM
Project management certifications through the Australian Institute of Project Management) are mainly meant for Australian market – yet they are based on international standards.

IPMA
This Swiss organisation (International Project Management Association) represents 45 national project management associations and offers a four-level project management certification.

AAPM  – American Academy of Project Management
AAPM offers PME, CIPM and MPM certifications (three different levels). All these these certifications are meant for executives and expect you to have graduate degree and years of experience experience in the field.

BrainBench
Brainbench project management certification is based on PMI’s project management certification, but it is more targeted towards organisations than individuals.

These are just some more known project management certifications offered – by no means is this list complete.

It’s not easy to obtain the PMP certification. You need to have a high school diploma and 7500 hours of project management experience OR a Bachelor’s degree and 4500 hours of project management experience. Plus you need to have 35 hours of project management training.

If you fit the bill, you can submit your application at PMIs website.

Once your data has been verified and your application accepted, you will be allowed to take a written examination where you will need to get a good score. The estimated current passing score is around 70%.

The exam consists of 200 multiple choice questions and there are several parts to the exam:

• Initiating
• Planning
• Executing
• Monitoring and controlling
• Closing
• Professional and social responsibility

You’ll be tested against your knowledge in time management, cost management, quality management, scope management as well as HR management, risk management, integration management and Procurement and communications management.

You can do the exam in either Prometric testing centers or on paper where there are no such testing centers nearby.

The cost of PMI examination is around $400-$600.

Preparing yourself
In addition to filling all the requirements – you might want to check out PMIs 20-question practise test at http://certification.about.com/od/projectmanagement/a/pmp_test_whiz.htm

You can also find free or cheap practise tests here – http://www.pmstudy.com/practicetestsindex.asp

Whether you want to find a project manager job, assistant project manager job or just something simply related to project management – you are looking for this specific job because you want it, you need it, you like it, right? If that’s so, you should be enthusiastic about finding the job of your dreams.

Sometimes it can take lots of time to find the job, but you should never stop looking. Persistence pays off.

Where should you start?

Do you have a CV?
Sometimes you don’t need it, but more often you do. And once the time comes to send it to the potential employer, you better have a good one. Do you know how to write a CV? If you don’t, have it done for you by professionals. If you are serious about getting the job, think about what a CV actually is. It’s not a blog posts, it’s not a simple letter to someone you know, it’s not your admission papers to some university. It’s a sales letter to the human resources guy in the company you want to work for. And sales letter needs to sell. It doesn’t need to introduce you, it needs to sell you to your potential employer.

Who do you know?
The easiest way to start is always to ask around. We all know a lot of people and each of them knows a lot of people. And if you spread the word that you’re a qualified project manager looking for a challenging work, you might actually get some great contacts this way.

Who are not looking?
One of the least used way of searching for a new job is contacting the companies you might want to work for. Without them actually looking for someone publicly. You see – it’s easy to go to some job site, submit your CV and start searching for available jobs or keep hoping someone will find you instead. While it’s something you could or should do as well, it is not an easy to find a job this way. Why? Simply because that’s how everyone are doing it.

Instead, you could choose 10 companies you’d like to work for and open communication lines with them. It doesn’t matter they are not actively looking for a new employee. Very often free spots are filled by the people from the inside (and by inside I mean people who are acquaintances of the current employees) and thus the job never becomes available. Yet, if they know about you too – you are already almost acquainted with them. And often, if your self-presentation is good, and as a potential project manager it MUST be, you might find a job this way even though you didn’t know they even had an availability.

For every publicly known job opportunity there might be 30 people interested in it. Your chances are 30 to 1. For every 10 companies you contact, there’s a great chance one of them is looking for a new project manager right now or in the near future and in this case, if they already know of a great project manager, you, you might get the job without any competition. The odds are in your favour.

Or maybe some job portals?
And if everything else fails, go to job portals. There are hundreds of them around. Just to name a few where you could find a job as a project manager :

• http://www.pmhut.com/job-hunting
• http://www.projectmanagement.computerjobs.com/
• http://www.dice.com
• http://www.jobserve.com
• http://www.eFinancialCareers.com
• http://www.monster.com
• http://www.guru.com

Just to name a few – and don’t forget the local job portals either.

And depending on your budget you could either look for a free project management software or something that costs thousands of dollars. And then there are times when it would be the best to get a fully custom built project management system – if you have the time until the beginning of the project and you know you have specific needs, getting some development firm to create a project management software built just for you, might be the best solution.

In addition to choosing between free and pricey project management software, you also have a choice between desktop applications and web based systems.

Free desktop project management software
Desktop project management software is a program that you can install on your PC. One of the free desktop project management tools is GanttProject – http://www.ganttproject.biz/

Another option here could be ProjectInABox – http://www.projectinabox.org.uk/ – it’s a tool that in addition to regular features, it provides Authentic and flexible PRINCE2 methods as standard. GanttProject is a cross-platform desktop tool for project scheduling and management.

Web based project management software
The pro of a web based project management software lies in its accessibility – you can access web based systems independent of where you are located right now, as long as you have access to internet. And in today’s world you probably are better off with something like that.

Here’s a list of some possibilities:

• Basecamp  – http://basecamphq.com/ (30-day trial, $24/mo min after)
• TeamEffect – http://www.teameffect.com/ (28-day trial, $15/mo min after)
• Project Manager – http://www.projectmanager.com/ (30-day trial,$25/mo min after)
• SantexQ – http://www.santexq.com/ (one project for free, premium $9.95/mo)
• iTeamWork – http://www.iteamwork.com/ (free)
• ActiveCollab – http://www.activecollab.com (7-day trial, license for life min $249 )
• EasyProjects – http://www.easyprojects.net/ (15-day trial,$75/mo min after)
• VisionProject – http://www.visionproject.se/ – (20-day trial,$67/mo min after)
• WhoDoes 2.0 – http://whodo.es (30-day trial, $5.99/mo min after)
• Lighthouse – http://lighthouseapp.com/ (30-day trial,$25/mo min after)
• CreativeOfficePro – http://www.creativeprooffice.com/ (free)

There are really hundreds of different project management systems out there, free, cheap and not so cheap. You’ll need to make the decision which works the best for you.

For a simple project management software comparison list you can see this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_project_management_software

What might be the average salary for a project manager?
Project manager salary might be anywhere between $60k to $140k annually. The average at Infosys is $78k while the average annual project manager salary at HP is $94k. And at the same time, the average at Epic System is just $64k.

As a senior project manager the higher number could go up to $180k while the lower end is the same as for the project manager.

See http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/project-manager-salary-SRCH_KO0,15_SDMC.htm for some more detailed information.

According to indeed.com, the average Senior Project manager salary based on job  offers on their website is $102k.

By the end of the day, the salary you can expect to receive as a project manager depends on the industry, your skills, your certifications, your level of education and a lot more tiny yet important factors.

The key elements of project management, #1:

-       People

-       Time

-       Money

The key elements of project management, #2:

-       Tasks

-       Resources

-       Time

The key elements of project management, #3:

-       Resources

-       Time

-       Money

-       Scope

The key elements of project management, #4:

-       Initiating

-       Planning

-       Closing

The key elements of project management, #5:

-       Initiating

-       Planning

-       Execution

-       Controlling and monitoring

-       Closing

And by no means are these five versions the only ones you might come across.

When you look at those lists, you’ll notice they are somewhat different, yet similar at the same time. We all think differently, it’s just how our minds work and what might look like a reasonable list to some, might not look as reasonable to others. For example look at #4 and #5, they are the same except #4 is missing the execution and controlling keys. The reason – the author just feels that you end up spending most of your time executing (meaning doing the work) and controlling (keeping track of things) anyhow, so need to list them separately. As mentioned, our brains work differently.

Independent of what list you might take as a bases of your own project management, as a successful project manager you’ll be doing the same things.

You start by sitting down with the client and try to figure out what it is that he needs, discuss the best ways to achieve the expected results and within what type of time frame, decide on the best ways of always keeping the client up-to-date.

You write down the goals, figure out the exact tasks that need to be completed, get together your project team and make sure they understand their responsibilities and confirm you are all working towards the same final result. You put together your plan, create project stages, divide them into pieces in form of tasks, let every project member know which tasks they are in charge of completing and the date/time they need to be ready.

You do the work and ensure the success of the project. What could be considered a successful completition of a project? It’s not about just getting the project ready but rather, when you finally sit down with your clients again both you together with your team, and most importantly, your client, needs to be fully satisfied.

A successful project manager must be capable of defining the project objectives and create a plan for reaching the objectives. Being a good project manager in this phase could be compared to being a good writer. A writer can use hundreds of different ways to write a book. But a good book needs to be easily read and easily understood. If it’s too complicated or hard to follow, it can’t become a best-seller. The same applies to successfully defining the project objectives and creating the plan to reach them.

And in order to do that – your first goal must always be understanding the project goals yourself. Often university professors and supposedly smart academics speak or write as if they were from another planet. They are unable (or unwilling) to speak about a subject with simple words. They like to use words people don’t use often or don’t even know, they like to use the sentence structures you need to read over and over and over again to understand the point they are trying to make. Of course, not everyone does it – the people who actually know what they are talking about, manage to make even the most complicated topics as easily understood as possible.

That’s exactly what you need to do as a project manager. You need to keep things as simple as possible.

Whenever you work with something that requires multiple steps to be taken in order to reach the end – each next step depends on the success of the previous step. And if the previous step wasn’t completed well enough, everything that is yet to come will have problems.

If possible, include the project members (your team) already in the project planning process. Because in this phase each team member could already give some great input and help the plan become a better one than you could have created alone. And – including your team members in the process gives them the feeling of being an important member of the team.

Organising the project includes assigning tasks to specific people, identifying, finding and dividing the necessary resources. Both financial and human resources.

The role of the project manager also includes being the kindergarten teacher. You must make sure the kids are playing not fighting with each other. And if someone doesn’t want to help the other kid even though he’s supposed to, you need to deal with it. You’re a problem solver, you must be the project Nostradamus as far as foreseeing potential conflicts goes. And you’re the King who must solve the conflicts that have arisen. Yet, you must be an equal friend of your „servants“ at the same time. Easier said than done, isn’t it?

I remember back in high school, one of my teacher always liked to say – trust, but verify. The same words combined also the signature phrase of Ronald Reagan.

So the next phase in project management is controlling and verifying. The function of controlling means tracking the project, verifying everything is as it’s supposed to be and dealing with any kind of disparencies between the plan and the reality.

You must remember that while the plan you created must be followed, your plan must always be flexible enough – should you see a way to improve the plan in order to improve the performance of your team.  And of course, in order to see the areas in which you could do better, you should use progress reports as a way to measure performance.

Being a successful project manager isn’t easy – it takes a lot of effort, experience and skills. But as with everything – if you can put your mind to it, you can do it.

But do you know what a project manager generally needs to do anyhow? The title looks great but we seldom know what’s behind the nice name.

As a rule of thumb, project manager is responsible for planning, executing, controlling and monitoring of the projects assigned to you.  While this description is still very broad, it should already give you a good enough idea of what it’s all about. Basically – as a project manager, you are responsible for the success of the project.

As a project manager you need to be able to define strict project requirements, estimate reasonable timeline, clearly state the goals and objectives, assign specific tasks to specific people and track their performance throughout the project. You need to be able to get the project done based on your employer’s or your client’s guidelines. Preferrably sooner than expected and preferably faster than expected.

Based on textbook examples, the job description for a project manager is fairly simple to write, to understand. Yet, no actual situation is based on any textbook. And this is why you should always make sure you understand what a potential employer would expect from you as a project manager.

Even the name of the project manager varies from company to company. Project manager, team leader, project coordinator. Whatever the specific details of the job are – by the end of the day, you are responsible for getting the project done.

Just keep in mind – while the general requirements are mostly the same – which is planning, organising and controlling the project and getting it done successfully, there are always small details that vary depending on the company you work for, depending on the project, depending on your team and your client.