Project management job opportunities to increase in China

Craig Killough, Vice President of Organization Markets for Project Management Institute, said in a recent interview with China Daily: "We probably see active project management professionals (PMPs) at 200,000 by 2020. And I see that there is very much potential to get to 1 million PMPs after 2020."

"The opportunity for the expansion of the project management professions in China is huge. And we see a very positive outlook for that capability and growing the confidences for project management in China. I fully expect sometime in the future pure number of PMPs in China will exceed the number in the United States."

According to Killough, as more big Chinese firms seek business opportunities globally, those companies need to focus more on dealing with cultural issues in the right way since they are attempting to do business outside their norm.

"The vast majority of time there would be subcontract relationships that they would need to develop. Going into the region for the first time, they must understand the environment of business in that area and adapt [to] their ways of doing things to how to do things locally."

Killough also noted that as the business moves so rapidly globally, organizations need to be able to operate with more agility.

Ray Ju, board advisor at MSOL Inc, a Japan-headquartered firm that provides project management advisory, execution and training, said in the latest annual PMI (China) Conference that, there would be 1.57 million project management job opportunities per year by 2020, calling for more professional talents.

Founded in the United States in 1969, PMI is a leading non-for-profit membership association for project management. And its PMP certificate is the world's only project management certification linked to the international standard ISO 17024. Currently more than 700,000 people possess the certificate in the world.

Established at the end of 2008, PMI (China) now has more than one million Chinese participants in the PMI project management training programs in the Chinese mainland, with nearly 150,000 PMPs.

Today, PMI (China) has offices in big cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The organization said it would open new offices in Sichuan province and Dalian in the next year. It also will seek new certified education institutions, in a move to enable more people to take exams in their local areas.