Job seeking
Would you drive a car on an expired licence?
Trevor Churchley ·
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: If your PMP certification has expired (or any other renewable certification), flag it on your resume or beware of the consequences!!!
When I conduct discovery calls with job seekers who are looking to get their job search back on track, I take a look at their resume and check out their qualifications.
When I work with project managers or program managers, they will often list PMP as a certification to which I ask 'is your PMP certification current?'.
More than half the people that I ask, tell me 'no, I've let it lapse' which is totally fine except, if you've let it lapse, you need to either remove it from your resume or put a flag on it to let people know that it's lapsed.
Being a job seeker means you need to build trust quickly. One way to kill trust is to not be 100% truthful on your resume.
What if you get through the selection process for a job and end up at reference and background checking stage and questions are asked about your PMP certification. If you don't have it and it's a requirement for the role, you may lose the offer. Imagine that, getting all the way through the process and stumbling on the final step when you could've just told the truth in the first place.
And this goes for any renewable certification as well as partially completed tertiary education. Either renew it or be honest about it. Don't risk killing trust over it.
My analogy here is one that everybody can understand. Would you drive a car with an expired drivers licence? No, I didn't think so.
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