I received the PM certification by Google 6 months ago. So it's about a time to share my retrospective on this with my audience.
That was my first heavy education: 8 months, 200+hours of learning, 27 education modules and $239. Phew! It looks massive even now when it's all finished, but when i took the decision of passing this certification i have many doubts if all this resources spent worth it.
So why did i decide to pass it in the first place? Cause the L&D function i've headed in Dev.Pro grew gradually, became more mature, in addition the business environment we operated in became more unpredictable and complex, so as well as our educational initiatives themselves. 5 years ago we had more operational and services function, but in 2025 almost 70% of our scope were projects of different complexity for 1-3 quarters lengths. Moreover, as a Head i had a challenge "How to multiply myself to make the department more efficient", so i decided to build more flat structure, where there is a lot of L&D experts who can take accountability for the separate projects and deliver it with a high degree of autonomy. That's when i first faced with a problem: to do so, I need to have people with a strong Project Management skills, so that can be Accountable at the same level as I can. Surely my first choice were my Leads who had a solid expertise, my full trust and bravery to experiment, so the only thing missed were knowledge and skills of Project Management.
Here is important to say, that i have full support and encouragement form the c-level Manager. She was aware of the importance of Project Management in L&D and fully shared and supported my ambitions and vision of the future department structure. Not only she allocated the budget for this education, she encouraged us, discussed with us our insights and how we can apply them on practice in our company. That was a huge part of the success of our learning path!
So how did my learning path looked like:
Research of the different PM educations and comparing the content, conditions and outputs to chose the most relevant for us.
Develop the structured learning path for the whole period of education - 8 months. This plan was shared with a group of my Leads and 4 of us accept it and decided to follow it till the end.
Allocated time for the learning weekly - put in calendar. Each week - new topic and in the end of the week - the common group discussion of the insights. No skips of the meetings!
I found the experts in my company - Head of PMO and one more colleague from PMO who agreed to meet with us monthly and during Q&A session cover all of our tricky practical questions. These meetings were a pure gold! Without them a lot of questions stayed unanswered, much material - superficial and didn't applied at practical cases.
Decision to practice all tools and approaches we learn at once in our projects - to experiment and understand what works for us and what's not. This approach was very useful not only for the knowledge become a system and practice application, but also for the team, who try out new tools and templates with us - they noticed our optimisation and mindset switch first and supported us massively.
Celebrate a small wins! It was very important step - the longer we learned the harder was not to stop doing it. All of us has other problems and priorities outside of work but our common accountability and promise keep us continue to learn till the end. We tracked in our learning plan how many hours of study left and how many is already behind, we shared our successful cases - when we tried new tool and see the better result. We encourage one another and support each other - when someone had a motivation dump, there were 6 shoulders more to rely on. That what's help us to reach our goal!
So what were the benefits we received after such a long and if honestly exhausting educational adventure:
Solid theoretical base and common vocabulary with stakeholders - give us advantage in negotiation and stakeholders management.
Better understanding of the context of delivery teams - make us more flexible and open to really hear our stakeholders and understand their pain points.
We became calmer and more resilient towards constant change and scope creep - we recognize these situations easily and have tools to manage them without much stress.
We understand project roles better - what is in our zone of responsibility and what's not. What can we influence and how and what can't.
Our mindset switched from service operational team more to business one.
We learn how to say "no", how to prioritise projects and even put them on hold when it's necessary and start doing it without much drama.
We learn to find the compromise managing time, resources and quality of projects - that was one of the hardest lessons for L&D perfectionist who wanted to deliver the best possible educational product.
We started rely more on data and made data-driven decisions. Not only it saves us money and time, but also made us more mature as a function for the company we work in.