I can clearly remember the day that I forgot everything I had learned about project management. It was a cool evening in early May and Gordon Brown had just left Downing Street. I was watching on television as he turned to the cameras and waved to his supporter for the last time. As he did so, a chill ran down my spine and I turned to my fiancé (now my wife) and said, “Darling, I think I’ve just forgotten everything I’ve learned about project management.”
“You can’t have done,” she said.
“I really think I have,” I said, getting increasingly unsettled.
“But you’re a professional project manager! That’s your job. You can’t just have forgotten it all.”
“I really think I have. I think I may need to call in sick tomorrow.”
I spent the evening pacing back and forwards as we tried to work out how I could simply ‘forget’ my job. Louise was gently prodding to see if my entire memory was affected or just certain areas.
“Is your entire memory affected or just certain areas?” she asked, with no sense of narrative flow.
“Just certain areas, I think. I mean, I can still remember bits of trigonometry from my maths A-level and I haven’t once used that in a practical situation. For god’s sake, I know what a cosine is! I can tell you facts about Gallipoli, that I haven’t needed since my History GCSE. Why is it that I can remember that, but I’ve forgotten the stuff I need to do my job?!”
“What about your degree? Do you remember any of that?”
“LOADS of it. I mean, because of the nature of psychology research, a lot of the information I learned on my degree is now out of date, but I haven’t forgotten much of it. Even the stuff I know is out of date still formed a useful part of the learning, so I guess it’s stuck in there.”
“So, it’s just the project management stuff.”
“Pretty much,” I said. I thought about it, and qualified. “To be fair, not the stuff I’ve learned by doing the job every single day for the last few years. Just the more esoteric stuff that I needed to know to pass the Prince2 Practitioner exam.”
Louise thought about this for a moment and then a fire lit up behind her eyes.
“Where’s your certificate?” she said, with an urgency I hadn’t seen since Take That announced they were getting back together.
I raced into the downstairs toilet and lifted the framed certificate off the wall. I took it back to the living room and handed it to Louise, still none the wiser as to what the significance might be.
Louise looked at the certificate carefully and then a sense of quiet satisfaction spread across her face as it became clear she had, once again, solved a problem that threatened to engulf us.
“There,” she said. And she pointed to a line at the bottom of the certificate. And there, in cold, dark print were the words that sealed my fate.
EXPIRES THREE YEARS AFTER DATE OF ISSUE.
I let the words sink in and the awful, terrifying implications for my career and the wider world of personal and professional development.
“But…” I stammered. “That can’t be right, can it? I’ve been running increasingly complex projects for three years now. If anything, my knowledge on the subject has grown significantly. How can a qualification simply expire?”
“I know. It doesn’t make any sense,” Louise acknowledged. “I don’t have to re-take my driving test until I’m 70 and that allows me to drive a two-ton vehicle at high speeds every single day. It’s not like your job involves safety-critical knowledge that changes regularly in a rapidly evolving market.”
“No, of course it doesn’t! The fundamental principles of project management are the same now as they were when the pyramids were built. They don’t change every three years.”
“Well, they must do, Jeremy,” said Louise, with a look of finality I was all-too-familiar with.
“Why’s that?”
“Because otherwise, this would just be a cynical ploy to get people to hand over money to needlessly keep their qualifications ‘current’ in a field where the basics may need refreshing occasionally but surely don’t need you to re-qualify. That would just be money for old rope.”
“I suppose it would,” I said. “Surely, there has to be a better alternative?”
“Maybe. If there is, I’m sure you’ll think of it someday.”
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