Project management has been an ever evolving subject matter for decades and the Project Management Institute (PMI) has contributed to make it a discipline that is today teached in any academic and executive education curriculum.

The Project Management certifications have had a tremendous success with over 1.5 million certified PMI-PMP professionals worldwide, while the Prince2® certification has reached 2 million exams sat, however they have lost ground in favor of Agile certifications, following a trend that started over a decade ago.

The PMI has responded to this shift with the PMI-ACP certification, then baking Agile into the PMBoK and eneded up acquiring the Disciplined Agile Delivery intellectual property.

Although the demand for project managers is still strong, project management certifications are now considered "nice to have" at best or irrelevant at worst... it's game over for project managers in a VUCA world! 

This is however a world of opportunities for program managers! Why?

• Agile is too fragmented and rapidly shifting to make it a gold standard in project management beyond the software industry

• The Agile hype is now deflating as what makes it attractive for organizations from a management perspective (mostly to resolve low employee engagement issues & tap into collective intelligence), the so-called "Agile mindset", gets incorporated into mainstream management best practices & new forms of organizational governance (productized vs projectized organizations), sending Agile back to what it is: a product development life cycle.    

• How do you scale up Agile? By adding a Program Management layer (as advised in the SAFe® Scaled Agile framework).

• How do you manage Hybrid initiatives mixing adaptative & predictive methodologies? By adding a Program Management layer.

• How do you ensure business value created in projects or products is turned into sustainable benefits ? By adding a Program Management layer.

• How do you maintain strategic alignment while welcoming and controlling change? By adding a Program Management layer.

• Change management (business & organizational), which is at the heart of Program Management, has taken over Finance as the one discipline to be mastered by executive managers to access board level positions

It has, like every PMI certification, the exclusive advantages of:

• being a niche certification (credential holders are less than 7000 worldwide) internationally recognized and trusted

• screening candidates on both experience & skills

• enforcing continuous professional development of credential holders

• connecting people through in-person events organized by "PMI chapters" in all major cities worldwide