PMP Salary: How Much Can You Make with a PMP Certification

Hello and welcome. In this video, we are going to go over the PMP salary expectations. I know it's probably on all of your minds— how much can you make once you get your certification? Okay, so first I want to share a PMI study with you. The link is on the bottom left-hand corner of this slide. So the key findings of this study is that they found that project managers who earned their PMP or their Project Management Professional certification enjoy a significant advantage in terms of salary and earning potential. Now what the study found was that they collected salary from 33,000 respondents and found that the PMP-certified project managers make on average 23% more than their counterparts across 37 countries, so the results are pretty consistent. What is even more amazing is that 72% of the respondents reported that their salaries increased within 12 months after they got Certified, so if you're serious about the career in project management, the PMP is essential to your toolkit, and it's a great addition to add to your resume, and it would really show employers that you're serious about project management. You understand the proven methodology on how to manage projects successfully. So the study also shows the medium salary across different countries. We're just going to cover a couple of the key ones. In the United States, the medium salary of PMP certified project managers. is $112,000 per year. In Canada, it's $98,000 per year. Now, on average, the PMP certified project managers make $10,000 more than those who are not certified. You may be wondering, so why is it that the PMP certified project managers make so much more? It's because if there— if I was a hiring manager and there was 2 resumes on my table, one without the PMP, one with the PMP, I'm probably going to go with the one with the PMP, all other things being equal, because what this shows me is that this person is serious about a career in project management. They have gone through the process, rigorous process, of getting certified. They've invested their time and their money into this process, and they understand the proven methodology for how to manage projects. So that gives me more confidence that they will be able to do this job, and that's why I'm more likely to grant them an interview versus a person without the certification. And that's why this certification is so valuable. In terms of cost for this certification, you need to pay PMI, or the Project Management Institute, $534 to take this exam, which means that this certification will pretty much pay for itself within a month of you getting certified because once you get certified, you'll be eligible for more job opportunities, more promotions, and once you get that promotion or that new job, then this certification already paid for itself very quickly. And the other cool thing is that unlike going back to college to get a project management degree, which will take you years, it could just take a few weeks for you to get your PMP certification. Now, one thing is that you do need at least 3 years of work experience to get your PMP certification, so if you don't have that, you can still take the CAPM certification, which doesn't require any prior job experiences. And once you are certified, Look, you can keep those salary increases for life. So when it comes to investment in your career, this is one of the no-brainer investments. If you go back to college, that's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars. This is $534 to get certified. And now I'm going to give you some tips on how to use your PMP to negotiate and increase your salaries. First of all, the PMP certification is based on the PMBOK, or the Project Management book of knowledge. As you're going through this process, you're going to get a lot of terminology, a lot of processes that you can learn on how to increase the productivity and the success rate of your projects, right? So as you're going through these proper terminology, although you may not use those terminologies in your project where you're just doing the work, right, but as you go back and you learn the formal training, you understand the formal processes, the formal terminologies of the tasks that you've done, you can go back through your resume and add in these proper terminologies, which will show the hiring manager that you know what you're talking about. Another thing you can do is add the PMP credentials to all of your resumes, to your LinkedIn, to your business cards. So your name, comma, PMP. That's going to give you some extra credibility when you're dealing with clients and in interview situations. And you could also approach your employer saying that now that you're certified, you understand these processes, you can add more to your organization, and this is one way that you can negotiate your salary increase as well. The last thing is that as you go through the PMP certification, you're going to learn a proven methodology or framework in the PMBOK for how to manage the project successfully, so you will have a complete toolkit on all of the things you can use to manage your processes. As you go into an interview, you can describe these 5 process groups, 10 knowledge areas, 49 processes to the potential employer, and you will be able to describe your project in this framework from start to finish, which will give them the confidence that you will be able to manage the project successfully. They'll say, wow, okay, you know what you're talking about. So the way that you use PMP to increase your salary and advance your career is to be able to understand and apply this framework into your daily work and into the projects you're managing. And here's just some sample terms from the PMBOK 6th Edition Guide from each of the 5 process groups: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring, controlling, and closing. You can use this as a reference guide to see where it fits properly to include some of these terminologies on your resume just to show the potential hiring manager that you do understand these terminologies and you can not only speak this lingo, but you'll also be able to do the tasks required to accomplish the project. Okay, so I hope you found this video helpful and hope you learned a lot about how you can utilize the PMP to negotiate your salaries, how much the PMP-certified project managers earn. And if you're interested, we're having a free course. You can sign up at www.exampm.com/free where we will teach you how you can obtain your Project Management Professional or PMP certification in the next 6 weeks. Yes, it only takes like a couple weeks to get the done, and then you'll be certified for life and you don't have to, you know, keep thinking about it and worrying about it. Just get it done and you'll get all the career advantages that we talked about in this video. So please sign up for this free course and I will see you there. Thank you so much for joining me today.