This article started with a simple realisation about what a job title tells me. When someone introduces themselves as an electrician, plumber, lawyer, or radiographer, I immediately understand the kind of work they do and then associate that work with formal training and professional requirements. In engineering and accounting, recognised designations such as Chartered Professional Engineer and Chartered Accountant give me further information and assurance that someone has met an assessed professional standard.
However, when someone introduces themselves as a project manager, the title gives me very little understanding or assurance about their professional preparation.
Have they been doing it since last Monday, or for 20 years? Have they attended a half-day course, completed a Master of Project Management, or earned a professional certification? Have they had any formal training at all?
The title of project manager alone tells me none of this and that is the problem. We use the same title for people with substantially different levels of experience, knowledge and assessed competence, without a common minimum professional expectation.
When so much of organisational and personal success depends on delivering projects successfully, I strongly believe it is time we defined what we should expect from someone calling themselves a project manager.
Why is it that in New Zealand, we expect the person working on our plumbing to demonstrate that they are qualified, certified, and authorised to do the work but don’t hold people with the tile project manager to the same standard. Sanitary plumbing operates within a statutory registration and licensing system, including provisions for trainees and supervised work. We recognise that competence matters because the consequences of getting it wrong matter.
Yet someone can become a project manager without holding a professional project management credential. There is no comparable compulsory entry standard for the occupation. That person might then be entrusted with a substantial budget, a critical organisational change, or a project on which a community depends.
I really struggle to understand why we accept this.
After 30 years working in project management, I am drawing a line in the sand. Anyone calling themselves a project manager in New Zealand should hold a current, recognised professional credential that demonstrates relevant experience and knowledge of the profession’s foundations. As a profession we already have suitable credentials. What we lack is a consistent expectation that people should hold one.
And it is more than an individual or organisational issue – it is also an issue for us as a country. The National Infrastructure Plan, released by Te Waihanga on 17 February 2026, makes this conversation particularly timely. It sets out a 30-year direction and emphasises better coordination, delivery and affordability. It also makes clear that progress depends on decision makers and delivery agencies doing things differently.
The Plan identifies commercial, governance and project leadership capability within public infrastructure agencies as essential. It describes poor scoping, weak commercial judgement and uneven procurement practice as sources of cost and delivery risk. Recommendation 16 calls for stronger public sector project leadership. Its implementation pathway includes creating a professional standard for infrastructure leadership and funding leadership development as a core input to delivery.
The Plan does not prescribe the credentials I propose here. That is my personal (and professional) position. But its diagnosis gives us a clear reason to take practitioner competence seriously.
Better scoping requires people who know how to develop and test a scope. Better commercial decisions require people who understand delivery models, contracts and risk allocation. Credible delivery commitments require people who can estimate, challenge assumptions and explain uncertainty.
I believe practitioner competence should be a key component of our response to these problems. Recognised certification can establish a professional baseline. Relevant experience, organisational support and continuing development must build on it.
There is also a related contradiction in how we organise our businesses and public agencies. A sizeable organisation would struggle to justify having no finance function. Its board would expect competent people, reliable financial information, appropriate controls and clear accountability. The same principle applies to human resources. Whether those functions are internal, shared or outsourced, their responsibilities still need to be covered.
Why, then, would an organisation whose strategy depends on delivering projects proceed without a project management department, a project management office, or an equivalent organisational capability?
If projects are how an organisation builds infrastructure, introduces services, replaces technology or changes how it operates, then project delivery is central to its success. It deserves the same deliberate attention as managing its money and its people.
Approving a project budget does not establish the capability to deliver it. Appointing a capable operational manager does not automatically give that person the knowledge, experience or support needed to manage a project.
Project management requires professional judgement: understanding and managing uncertainty, developing credible estimates, managing dependencies, working with stakeholders, controlling change, and recognising when the evidence demands a different decision. It also requires the confidence to tell a sponsor that the desired outcome cannot be delivered within the constraints they have imposed.
These are skills we should develop, assess and expect.
I regard project management as a profession. It has an established body of knowledge, professional associations, recognised standards, ethical obligations and routes for assessing practitioners. The absence of a generally legally defined, protected occupational title or compulsory statutory registration in New Zealand does not remove those professional foundations. It leaves us with a responsibility to establish and uphold our own expectations.
We should measure those expectations against professions such as engineering and accounting. Their recognised professional designations require more than someone declaring that they can do the job. They also make maintaining competence an ongoing obligation.
Engineering New Zealand requires members in the relevant membership categories to complete at least 40 hours of continuing professional development each year, subject to exemptions. Chartered Professional Engineers must demonstrate current competence through reassessment at least every six years.
Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand requires full Chartered Accountant members to complete at least 120 hours of continuing professional development over three years, including 90 verifiable hours and six hours focused on ethics, subject to applicable exemptions. Members must retain records and provide evidence if selected for monitoring.
Project management should expect comparable seriousness about assessed capability, ethical conduct and maintaining professional knowledge.
My proposed minimum is that every practising project manager should hold at least one of the following:
- Project Management Professional, or PMP, from the Project Management Institute.
- Chartered Project Professional, or ChPP, from the Association for Project Management.
- IPMA Level C, Certified Project Manager.
- Australian Institute of Project Management RegPM certification at Certified Practising Project Manager, or CPPM, level or above.
These credentials are different. Their eligibility requirements, assessment methods and expectations are not equal. PMP combines experience requirements, professional education and an examination. ChPP requires evidence of professional practice and technical knowledge. IPMA Level C assesses competence supported by relevant experience. AIPM’s CPPM requires evidence of actual project management responsibilities and practice.
What they do all have in common is that each requires relevant professional experience and demonstration of knowledge of best practice, although they specify and assess it differently. ChPP, for example, requires demonstrated experience and competence without prescribing a minimum number of years. None of them are entry-level credentials for people who have yet to practise.
For my proposed standard, credentials focused on a particular delivery approach or role are insufficient on their own. For example, credentials like PRINCE2, AgilePM Foundation, Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Product Owner can be obtained without prior project management experience.
These credentials have value. They can develop knowledge of an approach an organisation uses. PRINCE2 allows tailoring, and Scrum is explicitly defined as a framework within which different techniques and methods can be employed. My objection is that an introductory credential in a particular approach or role does not establish the combination of experience and broader professional understanding I expect from a project manager.
Project managers need the judgement to select and adapt approaches to suit the project. Their professional preparation should support that breadth.
To be clear, nothing beats experience and time in the trenches for developing practical judgement. I place enormous value on it. No examination can reproduce the experience of dealing with a difficult supplier, an unrealistic deadline, a divided stakeholder group or a project that is heading in the wrong direction.
But experience alone does not establish that someone understands professional best practice. An experienced practitioner may have been taught poorly, inherited ineffective habits, or worked for years without exposure to better approaches. They may also come to believe that their own experience is the only evidence that matters. Length of service does not make any of us immune to gaps in our knowledge.
In my view, experience combined with a recognised credential and ongoing professional development is stronger than experience alone. It brings practical judgement together with assessed professional knowledge and a continuing willingness to learn. That is the standard I believe our profession should expect.
Holding the credential must also mean keeping it current. PMP, for example, requires 60 professional development units in each three-year renewal cycle to keep it (and your name can be searched on a public register).
Employers should expect continuing development relevant to the work being undertaken. Procurement, commercial management, forecasting, leadership and ethical decision-making all deserve attention. Practitioners should be able to explain what they have learned and how it improves their practice.
A credential alone cannot guarantee good judgement or successful delivery. Employers must still assess whether someone’s experience fits the scale, complexity and context of the work. But that is an argument for building on a minimum standard, rather than abandoning one.
Experienced practitioners without these credentials should have a supported transition, with reasonable time, funding and access to assessment. People entering the profession need supervised opportunities to develop experience. We should create a clear professional pathway that connects learning with practice.
The organisational obligation matters just as much. A certified project manager cannot compensate indefinitely for weak sponsorship, unrealistic commitments, inadequate resources or decisions that nobody is willing to make. Boards and executives remain accountable for the conditions in which their projects operate. So yes, they all need training too.
An effective PMO, or equivalent project management function, should help create those conditions. It should develop people, support credible planning, expose delivery risks and provide information that improves decisions. Its success should be judged by its contribution to project outcomes.
Producing templates and collecting status reports is insufficient. A PMO that merely adds administration has missed its purpose. Equally, an organisation that removes its PMO still needs to explain how those essential responsibilities will be fulfilled.
For infrastructure agencies, that function should help turn the National Infrastructure Plan’s ambitions into delivery capability: matching people to the demands of projects, identifying skill gaps and supporting better decisions throughout delivery.
As a profession and as a country, we do not need to wait for legislation to act.
Employers should make a current, recognised credential that I have listed a minimum requirement for project manager appointments, with a defined transition for existing staff. Public agencies and private purchasers should include that expectation when procuring project management services. Professional bodies should work together to make the pathways clear and accessible.
Boards should ask who owns project delivery capability, whether it is adequately resourced, and how they know it is working. They should require professional development to be funded and planned alongside the projects that depend on it.
We accept professional standards for people whose work affects our homes. We should expect professional standards from people entrusted with the projects that shape our organisations and communities.
Delivering successful projects requires competent practitioners working within capable organisations. That capability needs deliberate investment and a professional standard against which it can be assessed.
This is the line I am drawing: relevant experience, a recognised professional credential and ongoing professional development should be the minimum expectation for anyone practising as a project manager in New Zealand.
Individuals, practitioners, employers, boards, public agencies and our professional bodies should now make that expectation real.
