What project management qualifications should you get in the Civil Service?

Broadly speaking there’s two big project management (PM) qualifications you’ll come across in the Civil Service. Warning: it’s a bit of an acronym word salad.

You have the Association of Project Management (APM) who have the APM Project Management Qualification (PMQ) which tends to be shorter and cheaper. It was developed to help in any environments, not just government.

Then you have PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) stuff which is a widely recognized project management methodology which was made in and for government in the 1980s and updated ever since. The PRINCE2 Practitioner qualification is the most well known.

A lot of big departments are moving away from PRINCE2 as it’s a bit clunky and seen as outdated nowadays. APM qualifications tend to be cheaper and more practical. Such as the APM Project Fundamentals Qualification (PFQ) and the Project Management Qualification (PMQ).

If you don’t want to become a project manager as a specific job, but run projects all the time, want to get better at them, and also get a qualification along the way it makes more sense doing an APM qualification.

Key takeaway: Association of Project Management (AMP) qualifications are more practical, cheap, and quicker to complete in the modern Civil Service.

This ignores standalone random qualifications in Agile, or whatever the newish Government Campus is pushing out for project delivery training and qualifications.