Posted by Jon
Thanks to a couple of readers for their emails in response to my previous post. Both discussed the challenges that may prevent some of those who’ve passed the APMP Foundation Level exam from moving on to the next level, Practitioner.John Chennells works in Logica’s UK Proposal Centre. He attended a Practitioner workshop we ran at the recent UKAPMP annual conference, and wrote:
Thanks to a couple of readers for their emails in response to my previous post. Both discussed the challenges that may prevent some of those who’ve passed the APMP Foundation Level exam from moving on to the next level, Practitioner.John Chennells works in Logica’s UK Proposal Centre. He attended a Practitioner workshop we ran at the recent UKAPMP annual conference, and wrote:
With impeccable timing, your latest posting appeared the other day just as I was completing the first draft of my Practitioner level submission. Everything you said about it in the workshop at Stansted is true – it has taken an incredibly long time to complete.
It’s particularly difficult to make sure you cover all the mandatory points, and make anything more than unsubstantiated statements, in just a couple of hundred words. And at times the answers required do seem to get very repetitive – I found I kept harking back to the same half-dozen examples. I suspect the rate of uptake would be rather greater if there were (say) twenty questions, but you could write perhaps 400 words on each. The answers might be a bit more interesting for the reader then, too.
Meanwhile, Sally Buttery (UK Bid Team Manager for Siemens Enterprise Communications) questions the ease of securing organisations’ sponsorship for Practitioner level. She recently passed Foundation Level on one of our courses, but:
Although I could find the time to progress to the next level(s) within APMP, I could not realistically justify the expenditure financially. In recessionary times, training is often the first to fall foul of ‘cost cutting’ and I could not envisage how a practitioner’s or professional accreditation from APMP could aid the company (my employer).
The dilemma APMP faces is that the foundation level is straightforward and achievable by most and many companies are willing to make this investment. However, many employers do want to spend more for the [Practitioner] accreditation which (is seen) to primarily benefit the individual’s objectives, and therefore, RoI is not evident.