You never love study... until its gone.

I'm back! Yes dear readers I've been away for a long time, but I have an good excuse! A new project at work took a large chunk of my time and that's another blog post for this week, but the other thing which took my time was studying for the CAPM exam, which I successfully completed on Monday.

So what is the CAPM all about then? The Certified Associate In Project Management is the light-weight version of the Project Management Professional(PMP) certification. It is designed for those people (like myself) who are keen to get into project management, but don't have the necessary hours to get the real PMP accredition.

The exam was criminally easy and made me slightly annoyed considering the many hours I sunk into self-study for this test. The time spent in understanding the project management processes is not a waste, but the waste is memorising PMI specific things, which aren't reflective of real life.
This has got to partly explain why there has been a lot of criticism about the PMI and how they are milking the certification process for all its worth. The amount of money you have to pay for what they give you is silly and the industry that's spawned around helping you pass the PMP test is easily making millions from this. All of this is true, but the fundamental core of what the course teaches you is still incredibly valuable information for project managers. Like any other certification, the PMP shows two things. One is you have the perseverance to go and get accredited and secondly that you have a solid understanding of the fundamentals. This won't make you a great project manager, but the chances of you being truly AWFUL are minimized and from a manager's point of view, this is tops.

I'm hoping that over time I can start using this information in projects I'm already on and hopefully I can use this certification as leverage into a real project management role either within or outside of Avaya in the next year.

That said, now that I've finished studying, I'm a little lost as to what to do with all this spare time. Anyone got any ideas of what I could do next?