Sharon March, PMPManager, Cisco Technical Team Avnet Technology [email protected]
PLAN A PATH TO YOUR DREAM JOB
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Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 3
Identifying your 1 – 3 Year Plan .................................................................................................................... 5
Identifying your 3 – 5 Year Plan .................................................................................................................... 7
Craft (or Invent) Your Dream Job Title .......................................................................................................... 8
Identify Your Stakeholders ............................................................................................................................ 9
The Planning Phase ..................................................................................................................................... 10
Presentation Matters .................................................................................................................................. 13
Creating a Scope Statement ....................................................................................................................... 14
Validating and Finalizing the Scope ............................................................................................................ 20
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................... 22
Disclaimer: The views, processes or methodologies published in this article are those of the author. They
do not necessarily reflect EMC Corporation’s views, processes or methodologies.
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Introduction In the IT industry, the right certification can lead you down a path of success much faster than just
experience. But what is the “right” certification? How do you choose from the myriad vendors and their
associated certifications? And how do you get started? This article will discuss how to look at your
certification options, what to look for to meet your needs, and how to not only get started, but reach
your goal.
Have you ever been intimidated by someone’s business card? The one that has not only the letters you
may recognize (MBA, PMP, VNX TA, CCIE) but some that you may not recognize but sound impressive
(CCDP, CISSP, VCP, IMSA). Then you see that person, and they don’t look particularly haggard; in fact,
they look rather vibrant, and when they speak, they are articulate, on point, and have solved a vexing
riddle in about 5 sentences. How did they put all of that information and credentialing together into a
cohesive and useful professional identity? What can you do to achieve that kind of confidence and
credibility? Not the generic “go get a degree” or “go get this certification”, but what specifically, in what
order, and how long would it realistically take? After all, you have a day job and a family and outside
interests that you are not quite ready to give up on.
The answer is surprisingly simple. Create your identity and actively pursue it. Craft a personal charter,
identify what you need to fulfill that charter, including courses and exams, time and money, create a
plan with milestones that you are willing to commit to, get buy-in from everyone that will be impacted
by your success, and then go for it! This article, roughly following the Project Management Institute’s
project planning framework through the Initiating and Planning phases, will guide you through clarifying
your identity and designing a plan to achieve those goals. Decide what you want to be known for and
then consciously and purposely pursue it.
It’s not all about the degree. It really isn’t. Let me give you a personal example. I started my college
career as a chemical engineer. That lasted less than a semester as I realized I was far more interested in
the college “experience” than the degree. (i.e. fraternity parties, collecting best friends for life every
Friday night, etc.) Somehow, I managed to graduate in 4 years with a Bachelor’s degree and lofty ideas
of curing juvenile delinquency. Fast forward a year after graduation, and I realized I needed something
more out of my career than working with juveniles that clearly had no interest in me “curing” them. I
also needed more than $7/hour to make a dent in paying off the credit cards I racked up in college. You
know the ones. Sign up for this credit card and we will give you a t-shirt/bottle of soda/pizza coupon.
Free pizza and a credit card with which to make a liquor run! What could go wrong? When I discovered
that rent checks actually DO bounce and the landlady still wants her money on time, I knew I had to do
something quick.
Enter a serendipitous call from a headhunter, who happened to have a job for me selling computers.
This particular reseller was looking for someone to learn about IBM’s newly-introduced laptop, the
ThinkPad. I went to my first product introduction and IT training session ever and very carefully took
copious notes on their new, exciting interface, “scuzzy”. Literally wrote that down. Luckily, I happened
to sit down next to a kind gentleman who took the time to explain to me what IDE and SCSI actually
were, along with how to properly spell both. That got me excited because I recognized I was learning
something that was technologically important at the time. Something told me this computer thing could
take me places, and boy did it ever. I worked at that reseller for 2 years before moving across the
country, working for several other resellers and eventually landing at a distributor, where I was exposed
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to a much larger view of the world in the form of more vendors, more technologies, and many, many
more options for a career path. I earned a few UNIX pre-sales technical certifications, tried my hand at a
few security certifications, even started working on another UNIX administration certification. But the
certifications had no cohesion or correlation between them, either by vendor partnership or technology
synergy. I simply took the certification for the vendor or specialty I happened to be interested in, or that
the department required at the time.
I moved to our Cisco business unit and knew from common industry knowledge that a route/switch
Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) was tablestakes to be considered a Cisco engineer. In fact,
when I applied at a competitor, the recruiter told me “let us know when you get your CCNA, and we will
get you in for the interview.” It wasn’t until my former boss, we’ll call him “Brad”, finally asked me the
telling question “what do you want to be known for?” He even added the more telling point, “It doesn’t
matter to me. Just decide what you want to do and go for it.” That kind of statement has immense
power. It truly didn’t matter to him. He was giving me control over my own destiny, and allowing me to
create my own identity. That identity and the path to achieve it, only mattered, and should only matter,
to me, and he supported my getting there.
He pointed out that I had dozens of various sales and technical certifications from myriad vendors, (Sun
Microsystems, HP, CheckPoint, Brocade, Cisco, NetApp) but those certifications had no cohesion into an
identity. My boss’ point was that all of those certifications, and any future certifications, should mean
something in furthering the professional identity I create and want to promote. He recognized that I was
good at taking exams, training, and teaching others how to get through those exams, and helped me
figure out a way to use that power for good. We created a position, the Cisco Education Project Lead, so
I could help partners select the right certification path for themselves to support their specific business
strategy (their company identity), and help them understand what it takes to complete the exams to
fulfill their chosen specialization and further promote their differentiating identity in the market. We
also discovered, as I had conversations with partners around this topic and as my identity as the
Education Project Lead became more firmly established with the group, that my particular identity and
corresponding skills and experience in taking the same exams I was telling them to take, had immense
value to our customers. They struggled with figuring out which certification exams to take and what
effort they should expect to put behind each type of exam, sales and technical. Based on my experience
of being in their shoes for the same exams, and the fact that now my identity as an Education Project
Lead was firmly entrenched, I have been able to help partners down a certification path with as few
diversions and wasted time as possible
However, I realized that the certification accomplishments, and the partner conversations they enabled
me to have, should not be the end, but a means to an end. The certifications and the ability to help
others create and follow their own certification and specialization path, should come together in an
organized fashion to create a professional identity for myself that I can build a career on. I shouldn’t just
collect letters behind my name or enough certificates to paper a small bathroom, for the sake of saying I
have this, that, or the other certification. The certification and experiences should be purposeful; on
purpose for a purpose. That was an ‘a-ha’ moment for me. What should be my next logical step in my
career path, after the Education Project Lead? Brad helped me corral my skills and experiences to meet
the immediate need of a professional identity, but where was I to go from here?
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Enter another serendipitous connection; a close friend of mine, we’ll call her “Chere”, who was a
technical recruiter. She recognized many of the certifications I had, and while she didn’t know what they
all meant, she knew that some of them were difficult to earn. And she knew that employers wanted
specific combinations of them for their candidates, depending on the jobs they were looking to fill.
Chere gave me a piece of advice I never forgot, and one that I return to time and again when I’m
wondering what I want to do with my career. Find the job title that you want, research the qualifications
for that job title, and then go about filling those requirements if you don’t have them. Not the job, the
job title. That makes a difference, because when someone asks “what do you do?” you naturally
respond with “I’m a Systems Engineer for Super Awesome Reseller, LLC” or “I’m a Project Manager for
Amaz-o Corporation.” You don’t respond with an explanation of your job, you respond with your job
title. That was another ‘a-ha’ moment for me. Not only put the certifications and experience into a
cohesive and usable professional identity, but directly tie them to a title or a 3-4 word description of
your function.
Do not assume that someone can connect the dots and having a Cisco CCNA, VMware VCP, and EMC TA
certification automatically makes you a VCE Systems Engineer? Tell them you are a VCE Systems
engineer and let the certifications you have fill in where necessary. To that end, I earned more than one
Professional level Cisco certification, my EMC VNX TA certification, became a certified Toastmaster
Competent Communicator, and earned my Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. I
didn’t want to be just a Cisco Education Project Lead, I wanted to be an Education Enablement Project
Specialist, being able speak to any audience level or size, across vendors and across technologies. That’s
the point of this paper. Explicitly connect the dots in a title or function, and back that title up with
specific certifications and experience that matters both to you and to your career. If you follow the
framework presented here, at the conclusion you will have a career title or function to work towards, a
realistic plan, schedule and budget to get there, complete with specific tasks and milestones, buy in
from your employer and your family, and you excited to get started.
Identifying your 1 – 3 Year Plan The first thing you need to do is determine exactly where you are. Think of this as the Initiate phase of
the project that is Your Career. Specifically, in project management terms, you are going to uncover
initial requirements and determine feasibility of achieving those requirements in 1-3 years and in 3-5
years, create a charter in the form of Your Dream Job title or function, and identify stakeholders who
can help you get there.
First, you want to uncover initial requirements, and you will do that in 2 steps, assuming that you will
stay in technology. Where are you now and where do you want to be? These phases can be broken into
a 3 year cycle, 1-3 years, and 3-5 years. Consider the next 1-3 years as maximizing your current position
and creating a launching pad for the phase you will be in 3-5 years from now. The reason you should be
looking at your current job for only 1-3 years is essentially because of Moore’s Law. Processors and
silicon capabilities will double every 12-18 months, which means that the industry has a potential to
shift in varying degrees every 18-36 months. So, let’s take a look first at the immediate needs of 1-3
years out, and plan for that time with the idea that this will be a “stepping stone” phase; the pre-
requisite tasks of getting you ready to move to the next phase in 3-5 years. Therefore, take a look at
what you are doing and how you do it, and then consider how it may change in 24-36 months.
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Understand where you are right now, and what you need to do to either maintain or prepare for a
change. For example, if you are a converged solutions design architect, what specific training and
preparations should you be making to make and/or keep your position viable and pertinent? If you are
expected to be a specialist in a particular vendor, understand what the vendor considers base level
requirements for your job function. If you are a pre-sales design engineer for a particular vendor or
technology, there is probably a pre-sales technical specialization exam that you are expected to take.
Even if you have years of experience designing solutions around that vendor or technology, your
credibility may be minimized without that certification. Be aware of what that certification should be
and if you don’t have it, that should be first on your list of 1-3 year requirements.
You may have a readily available source for immediate 1-3 year requirements; your annual review. I
imagine that you have or will speak to your boss about what your plans are for the coming fiscal year.
And chances are, there is a certification or two on your yearly goal sheet. Add those certifications and
training goals to your 1-3 year list, so you can take them into consideration as you build out your
schedule and assess feasibility. Also consider your colleagues. See what your counterparts are doing and
what certifications they hold. If those qualifications would prove valuable to you as well, put those on
your 1-3 year requirements list, especially if those colleagues have the same job title and description as
you do.
Consider your current position in the narrow and immediate sense of how you personally contribute to
your company’s success, but be sure to pick your head up and look around at how your position sits in
the industry. This is an investigation you should not do in a vacuum. Consider not only what you
specialize in, but also how that vendor or technology plays in a market. Become a “student of the
industry”. Read trade magazine and business articles. See who acquired whom, who had a bad few
quarters, where companies are pulling back and where they are investing. Try to read between the lines.
Read about not only your chosen vendor but vendors with whom they are partnering. Why are those
particular vendors considered “complimentary?” What does that partnership mean to you? Why would
someone choose to invest in a particular technology or develop a new app? When you are reading these
articles, find a central location to cite them or write them down, so you can refer back to them and
translate that data into information you can use when you plan.
As you figure out which complimentary vendors to delve into more, keep in mind that vendors do not
operate in a vacuum any more than you should. There is typically a reason and rationale to their
required certification paths. Vendors take time to look at the technology landscape, and while some
may be further ahead than others, typically that certification path provides real value and positions you
to take advantage of the coming wave. They make sure that their partnerships will also take advantage
of that coming wave, and revise their specializations accordingly. For example, if a hardware vendor
wants to get into cloud, for example, they may establish a relationship with a cloud services provider
and create a certification path that focuses on software defined networking, both of which they believe
will further their cloud partnerships and business reach. Therefore, when you have narrowed your focus
down to a technology vendor or two, take a look at the industry landscape surrounding that vendor. For
example, with EMC, you may take time to look at converged infrastructure, and where it is going, how it
is moving into the cloud, what applications and verticals are they focusing on, and why is Dell so
important to success, outside of simply the obvious “EMC just got acquired”.
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Now that you have some baseline information about your chosen vendor and the industry around your
chosen vendor or technology, take some time and look at what those complimentary vendors consider
“tablestakes” for your current position. Conduct a similar analysis that you did for your primary vendor
or job function. For example, if you are a Cisco Design Engineer right now, you very well may have a
Cisco Certified Design Associate (CCDA) certification. That is what Cisco sees as a base-level certification
to be considered a qualified, pre-sales design engineer. But let’s say that your actual job is designing the
Cisco portion of a VSPEX® solution on a team with 2 other individuals who specialize in EMC and
VMware. While you may not be required to have more than an EMC ISM certification, perhaps it may be
beneficial to have that VNX TA cert. And while you may not be the subject matter expert on VMware,
maybe it would be beneficial for you to get a VCP cert. You may not use the knowledge every day, and
you may not be expected to know the answers to the depth that your counterparts may, but wouldn’t it
be nice to be able to speak to all 3 key components of the solution, in the off chance that one or both of
your colleagues cannot make the meeting? If you can seamlessly transition from one vendor to another,
talking about the entire solution, and have the credentials on your business card to back up your
opinions, how much credibility do you think you would have with a customer’s SE who will be
responsible for ongoing operations of the entire solution, not just the one vendor you happen to
specialize in? Your customer has just found a kindred spirit who can speak across all 3 platforms, all 3
languages and at least on paper, understand where they are coming from as they implement this
solution. You may have just moved up the trusted advisor stack and have secured your position on a
much firmer foundation than you had before.
Identifying your 3 – 5 Year Plan At this point, you have collected initial requirements. You have analyzed where you are, and have
identified immediate certification and training needs to maximize your position for the next 1-3 years.
Now you can start considering where you want to make the next step in 3-5 years. Take another look at
where you think and where the industry thinks your current position and career stands. Re-read those
industry articles you cited before with fresh eyes. Where do you think those articles indicate that your
chosen specialty will lead? Let your curiosity and the information lead you.
For example, let’s say that you just heard that EMC may be bought by Dell. Suppose you are a Cisco
Systems Engineer with a CCDA, and are on a team that designs VSPEX solutions. You may read between
the lines of the acquisition and conclude that Dell servers may become a greater part of your life and
solution offering than they have been in the past. And with VSPEX being a framework type of solution, it
is entirely possible that the meeting conversation may veer to Dell servers. So you may want to explore
what the CCDA equivalent certification would be for Dell. Perhaps Dell is out of your comfort zone right
now, but you may find that the Dell certification will prove to be a valuable addition in helping further
your “trusted advisor” position with partners. Expand your potential circle of influence, looking for
where your vendor/solution/technology specialty logically fits in the technological landscape, and
identify your requirements from there. Keep in mind you are in the 3-5 year requirements identification
stage. If it seems your requirements are stretching well into the future, that is OK. Put the requirement
down, so you can keep it or discard it when you move to creating detailed requirements in the planning
phase. By keeping the requirement, and your reasoning behind the requirement, in play at this point,
you give yourself an opportunity to have a bigger picture with more options to craft the perfect scope
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statement for Your Career and Your Dream Job. The idea is to get a complete view of the current you
and then the future you. Here is where Brad’s and Chere’s advice comes into play.
Decide what you want to be known for, and craft your Dream Job Title. If you cannot finalize a specific
title, craft a Dream Job Function that may be developed into a title later on. Your Dream Job, Title, or
Function, will be your charter; the reason you are embarking on this process. It should be crafted based
on the research you did for your immediate 1-3 year needs, which is serving as a launching pad for the
next 3-5 years, to position you to be the most perfect candidate possible for Your Dream Job, if you are
planning on staying in technology. At the end of the 5 years, ideally your Dream Job will be either a
reality or very feasible.
Craft (or Invent) Your Dream Job Title If you have taken time to consider and think and even guess a little as to where the industry is headed,
what the writing on the wall says, you have probably found some articles that while not pertinent to
your immediate needs, have piqued your interest. Feed your curiosity. For example, in researching
company, vendor and industry requirements for being a backup expert, you may have discovered that
the nuances of archive and retrieval strategies for databases may be of interest to you. You may now be
a pre-sales backup and recovery expert, but really want to be known as the Data Domain® installation
guru in an Oracle mid-size enterprise. So your title may sound like “Backup and Database Storage
Implementation Engineer”. In your research on requirements for a Vblock® architect, you may have
found the banking vertical and managing the considerations in designing for regulatory compliance
dynamic and exciting. You want to be known as the VCE700 design expert for the banking industry, so
your function may be “Architecting and Designing Converged Infrastructures for the Financial Vertical”.
Whatever you envision Your Dream Job to be, craft it. Use your current job as a launch pad for where
you see yourself in 3-5 years. Be open to where the data takes you and what you may need to learn to
make you stand out from the crowd. Let me drive this home with a story about someone, we’ll call
“Tim”.
Tim is in the traffic signal industry. He designs traffic signal operations and the operation centers that
control them, called Traffic Operations Centers (TOC). Think NOC for traffic signals. When a car crosses
the white stop bar line at an intersection, a camera notices a difference in the expected pattern of the
empty road at the intersection, and sends a signal to the large green control box that you see on the
corner. Inside that control box are circuits that change the lights from green to yellow to red and back to
green, controlled by memory boards (controller boards) that hold programs to change the lights based
on current traffic conditions, time of day, required traffic flow patterns, and so on. Data, including the
video images of the traffic activity at the intersections, all get sent back to the TOC via Ethernet, for
further analysis and consideration for timing changes based on circumstances like seasonal congestion,
school year schedules, and so on. Those new programs, once approved, can be uploaded via wireless
Ethernet to the controller boards or directly programmed in. Bet you didn’t realize that traffic signals ran
on an Ethernet network, did you?
Well, Tim was the one that started that technology shift from direct serial connection to Ethernet in the
traffic signal industry in his home state. He had a traffic industry-specific certification, but realized that
Ethernet, and specifically wireless Ethernet, was something that would not only improve traffic signal
2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 9
timing management, but could expand the traffic industry. He earned his Cisco CCNA to understand how
to administer and manage Ethernet networks, earned his PMP certification to effectively lead TOC
projects, and is now working on his Route/Switch CCNP. These certifications position him to be a
credible thought leader in the next wave of traffic communications to initiate and lead projects around
cutting edge technology and opportunities that interest him, like what he is exploring now, vehicle-to-
vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication; essentially driverless cars.
My point is, don’t be afraid of where your curiosity may take you. Think about what is piquing your
interest on the horizon of where you are now, and craft a Dream Title or Dream Function. Put all the
buzzwords and lofty-sounding titles in there that you like, because you will be using those words for a
purpose. Then take that freshly minted title or function and evaluate it. Search career and job sites for
that title or for the function if the title is a little too creative for standard job search engines. As you look
at the qualifications for the results, refine your title until the qualifications and your Dream Title line up
as close as possible to what you would really like to do in 3-5 years. It is OK if you have more than one
Dream Title, or a Dream Title and a Dream Function, but try to limit it to 3, a reasonable number to keep
track of, especially if you start asking for job opening alerts. Now that you have that Dream Job Title,
take a look at the certification and experience requirements that the job sites post. Identify, at a high
level, what you need to learn and what experience you need to make that Dream Job happen.
Remember, Your Dream Job title is going to be your charter; your goal at the end of 5 years. Education
Enablement Project Specialist is completely of my own creation, but it encompasses my interest in
certifications, helping others create certification paths for a purpose, and managing their teams towards
successfully fulfilling that purpose. Your charter in the form of your Dream Job title or function should
define your purpose as completely as possible, so you can focus specifically on what you should be doing
to get there.
Identify Your Stakeholders Once you have identified where you are now and where you want to go, you then need to identify who
your stakeholders are. This is an important step. Just as vendors don’t operate in a vacuum, neither do
you as you work towards that Dream Job. You won’t go this alone. Your employer has a vested interest
in making you a valuable and long term employee. It is cheaper to keep and grow a current employee
than hire and re-train a new one. So, your employer is a key stakeholder. Make sure they know what
you are thinking. Your employer will most likely be pleased that you are taking an interest in the industry
at large and figuring out a way to make yourself more valuable to how the company can be a bigger
player. The more individual contributors look beyond their cubicle walls to what they can do outside
their immediate job needs to help the company towards profitability, the more valuable they tend to be
seen. Plus, you may be surprised at how much support (i.e.“flexibility on the job”) an employer may
grant you to study and get certified, if you put forth the pro-active effort to take charge of your career.
That’s not to say your employer won’t ask for something in return, like a guarantee you won’t leave for
6 months, but an engaged employee tends to be a contributing and energized employee, which is good
for any company interested in growing profits and the bottom line.
Another key stakeholder is your family and friends; your social network. Don’t underestimate the value
of a personal support system. Human beings are social creatures by nature, so be sure that you are
considering how your friends and family can help your succeed. Depending on the certification you
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choose to pursue, you may be studying nights and weekends. I remember studying for my Cisco CCNA
(my first “real” technical certification) while my son played in the bathtub. But, I had to get buy-in from
my husband that he was okay with me multi-tasking in that fashion. It is all about balance. As much as
we would like to say that we will spend 6-8 hours every day for 2 straight months studying, the fact is,
our phones ring, our time is in demand, and there are soccer games, math homework, school plays and
minor league softball which should get our attention too. Once you know what those requirements are,
go against our normal tendency of introversion and going it alone, and tell people. Tell those you
consider part of your support system that you will need their help in reaching your goal. People need to
be told what you are going for to know what you are going for, and once they know that you are
working to better yourself, you may be amazed at the level of support you will get at home.
Your final stakeholder is you. And you are the most important stakeholder in this entire process. Make
sure that you are being realistic and brutally honest with yourself throughout this entire initiating and
planning phase, so your execute phase can go as smoothly as possible. Take a genuine look at how you
feel about all of the elements of Your Dream Job, and make sure that you are willing to hold yourself
completely accountable throughout the entire process. Your Dream Job means absolutely nothing if you
are not on board with everything you are about to lay out. You are going to take a considerable amount
of time to follow the initiating and planning process outlined in this paper, to move your career forward.
Make sure after all of this work that you are willing to put some things down in stone and not cut
yourself any slack in missing self-imposed deadlines. Three years and 5 years can seem like a long time
when you are in the middle of executing your plan. Having the discipline to hold yourself accountable in
finishing goals that you set out to get to Your Dream Job is going to be key to your success.
Now, we have completed the initiating phase of the project that is Your Career. We have the charter in
the form of a Dream Job Title. We have uncovered initial requirements by identifying gaps in your
current title and using those to help you establish goals for the next 1-3 years, so that you can focus on
tasks and certifications over 3-5 years that will position you for ideal candidacy for your Dream Job, and
we have identified stakeholders in you, your family and in your current employer. Now, we can start
planning.
The Planning Phase Specifically, in the planning phase, you are going to determine detailed requirements, determine your
scope, create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), create a budget and schedule, finalize your scope,
and then get buy-in from your stakeholders. You will finish this phase, and we will finish this paper, by
kicking off your education plan with a solid understanding of what it will require in time, effort and
money, deliverables, and buy-in from all of your stakeholders. In other words, you will understand what
it will take and will have a plan to achieve or be best positioned for Your Dream Job, with a reasonable
schedule, budget, and buy-in of support from your employer and your family, and your own
commitment to the plan, so you can kick off your education path knowing that you have pro-actively set
yourself up for success.
First is determining detailed requirements around your charter; your Dream Job title or function, so you
can create a scope statement. Keep in mind, as you determine your detailed requirements, these
requirements are yours. YOU are the project in question. Adding, deleting, changing requirements are all
part of the process and completely okay until you create that final scope statement. Project
2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 11
management is iterative. You should be taking a rolling wave approach to determining your
requirements, selecting, categorizing and assessing feasibility of success around those requirements
until you reach the project scope finalization and approval phase. In other words, as each effort and
money is finalized for each certification or requirement, you can move it back and forth between the 1-3
year phase and the 3-5 year phase, or re-analyze the need and decide to discard it altogether. Again, let
the data and resulting information guide you in establishing what you want to accomplish and when.
For the purposes of this paper, we are going to break requirements identification into three categories
to consider; 1-3 year requirements, 3-5 year requirements, and soft skills. Think of it as being an MD.
Every doctor has a base level skill set that they must have in order to get their medical degree. However,
doctors have specialties, such as orthopedist, cardiac surgeon, or ER doctor. And doctors must be able to
communicate effectively with patients so the patients understand what is wrong and what treatment
they are receiving. Think of your 1-3 year as your general MD, and your 3-5 year as your specialty, and
your soft skills as your bedside manner.
The first requirements you want to look at will be filling in current gaps to make you as effective as
possible in your current position for the next 1-3 years, as we explained in the initiating phase. You have
already built an initial set of certification requirements, covering immediate certifications to fill skill gaps
for your current position and integrating goals from your annual review. The more basic requirements,
including pre-requisites that you have for your current job that have not been fulfilled yet, belong in the
1-3 year phase of your plan. The 1-3 year phase should be a logical stepping stone, in some form, to your
3-5 year phase of the plan. Once you have outlined what you see as immediate needs, the first question
you want to ask yourself is are those immediate needs actually achievable in 1-3 years? Is it reasonable,
for example that you will go from complete novice to fully certified expert in a year? Probably not,
unless that is your only function and your employer is willing to put all of your customer meetings and
contacts on hold until you complete the certification. Part of verifying and refining your 1-3 year goals
and your 3-5 year goals will be making sure that your 1-3 year and 3-5 year goals are actually achievable
within the timeframes, and if not, can they be modified to fit the 5 year timeframe or are they really not
necessary and can be discarded completely.
For the certification exam portion of your requirements, here’s a good rule of thumb I use when
explaining the actual effort and time required to prepare for a technical exam. For every hour of formal
classroom time, estimate 2 hours of self-study time to prepare for a technical exam. If your list of
certifications, using the preparation rule of thumb mentioned above, comes out to 600 hours, and you
know that you are only going to be able to dedicate 1 hour a day at most to studying, it would not be
reasonable to think that you will accomplish the list of certifications in a 260-workday year, or even 2.
Keep in mind that you do have a day job, probably not as a professional student, and use a realistic
estimate on how many hours during the workday you can dedicate to studying and exam preparation.
So, another rule of thumb to use for determining time feasibility is that most working adults will only be
able to dedicate 2 hours a day for 3-4 days out of the week during working hours to study. This 6-8 hour
per week estimate is what I have found to be true for most people, as I have advised partners over the
past few years. Customers, meetings, vacations, sick time, and general employment obligations usually
keep people to around 6-8 hours per week, spread out across 3-4 days, unless your employer is willing
to give you extended time off the job to study and prepare for exams.
2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 12
Keeping in mind that your rough schedule is 1-3 years for immediate needs and 3-5 years for Dream Job
needs, you can now take a more honest look at what certifications truly are necessary, based on the
time you have available, what certifications can be delayed, and what certifications are nice to have and
therefore must be out of scope. Some, of course, will be immovable, like if you are an EMC pre-sales
design engineer, but you do not have your corresponding EMC TA certification. But others may be able
to be moved to later in your schedule, like the 2nd or 3rd level certifications for the complimentary
vendors. You will create a specific schedule and budget later on in the planning process based on your
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) but keep this rule of thumb in mind as you determine your list of
detailed requirements and determine the level that you should attain and in which phase they should be
attained. Project planning is iterative. Refining the requirements with the time constraint in mind is part
of the process to create your final scope, so you are set up for success.
Now, you want to take a look at the certifications and education that you will need in 3-5 years, so your
resume clearly shows that you are the number one candidate for Your Dream Job title, and you have all
the negotiating power when that offer comes through. Think in broader terms than you did for the 1-3
year phase. Your 1-3 year requirements were to be your stepping stone for your 3-5 year requirements,
and that stepping stone should be absolutely rock solid. Now, you can explore your specialty. Follow
Brad’s advice of “what you want to be known for” and Chere’s advice of finding Your Dream Job Title.
You may want to be a doctor, but you want to be known as a neurosurgeon. That title “neurosurgeon”
has a much more specific identity than “doctor”, and is what you would craft your 3-5 year goals around.
Look at your 3-5 year requirements by identifying those certifications that you simply did not have time
for in the 1-3 year phase and make sure that they really are “requirements” before you move them into
the 3-5 year phase. As you enter your 3-5 year phase, you are closer to applying for or moving into Your
Dream Job. Your time is therefore much more precious so make sure it is laser focused on the endgame,
and serves the necessary purpose at the necessary level. Look further into and beyond the
complimentary vendor skills, leaning on those industry articles you noted in your initiating research, and
make sure that the professional level certification you identified is truly necessary. I’m not encouraging
you to lower your standards for success; just the opposite in fact. I’m encouraging you to make sure you
are using your time in the most effective manner for maximum impact on your positioning into the
Dream Job. For example, let’s say you are looking at a vendor who is focusing on “solution sales”. They
talk about “ecosystems” and “strategic partnerships”. You have decided Your Dream Job will be
leveraging your existing technical expertise and moving into a Sales Solution Advisor and Architect
position is your Dream Job Title. So, you are starting to think the same way, going to market as a
“solution advisor” to enable the “solution sale”. You would ask yourself, what is part of that solution? Is
it a specific vendor, a certain combination of vendors, or is it a broader industry knowledge? In other
words, do you need to hold a professional level certification on how to install every specific brand of
server or security vendor that is part of the solution technology about which you would like to advise
and which you would like to sell, or would a general CompTIA certification support Your Career and Your
Dream Job Title better? Take a careful and thoughtful assessment of what you truly need in these 3-5
years to position yourself as the perfect candidate and be sure you are putting forth effort in the right
area, not just being busy for the sake of being busy. “Overwhelmed” and “swamped” are not ideal
states; “focused”, “calm” and “organized” are much more useful states to make powerful use of your
precious time.
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As you determine what certs you want to go after for Your Dream Job, keep in mind that typically the
certification is just the door opener. It gets you the interview because your resume checked a certain
box for them in the requirements section. You want to make sure you are planning for “selling yourself”
and articulation as well. Here is where you may need to get comfortable with discomfort.
Presentation Matters Once you know what technical certs you need, you need to take a look at refining that “bedside
manner” we spoke of earlier. When you searched the job sites for Your Dream Job title, you probably
noticed several soft skills, such as “strong communicator” or “effective leader”, in addition to the
technical certifications required. Do not dismiss or minimize those soft skills. There will be people that
you will have to interact with, some of whom you may not like, respect, or both. And you will need to
communicate with them effectively, not only to get your point across, but to promote yourself and your
ideas. An individual that you dislike may be key to your personal advancement and they may be in a
position where it is not an option to ignore them. Remember, Your Career and Your Dream Job Title are
completely your own, and your biggest stakeholder is you. Make sure that you are capable of being your
own champion, selling your ideas to any audience as required, and keeping relationships intact,
regardless of your personal feelings. Which means making sure that you have those writing and
communication skills strong and ingrained in your daily habits. Make sure that you can articulate
yourself in a polished and professional manner, both in speech and on paper, so you can interact
effectively and be a contributing member of a team. This is not just a Miss Manners recommendation.
This is a business skill that technical people tend to overlook, because they falsely think that their
certifications will carry the day. Certifications will get you in the door, but your professional presentation
of self is what makes or breaks your job.
Make sure you proofread your emails for grammar and tone so your message is what you intend it to
say. Your message comes across much stronger if you have proper verb tense, word usage, spelling, and
have capitalized and punctuated properly. Let me show you a real-life example of an email I recently
received from a contact, who is considered the vendor lead for his particular technology practice.
I took our best partners in XXX and factored in how close they were to getting their [certification]. These
partners either are doing the most revenue consistently and/or growing faster than the rest. Then I
broke it up into 3 rounds based on how close the partner was to getting their [certification] already.
T, S, A, K are our strongest XXX partners ready to take it to the next leave. I’ll like to add R and C to this
but their individual certs need to get the [cert] are lacking so they ae in round 2 and will need more work.
This quarter I’d like to focus on round 1 partners getting them their [cert]. I think if we put an extra focus
on these partners they will do a few a quarter just on their own.
I’m reaching out to set up calls with these partners to see if they are interested. If so this is where the
training and exams come in I’m working on scheduling. Anyways, do you guys want to set up a call to
discuss so I can explain in more detail and give the run day on why these guys?
Were you able to follow that thread with ease, or were you tripped up a few times with the lack of
commas, improper verb tense, and words that passed spell-check but were simply the wrong word to
use? The only things I changed in this email were details to “protect the innocent”; replacing the specific
practice name with XXX, eliminating the names of the partners (who apparently are ready to take it to
2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 14
the next leave rather than the next level) and the name of the certification. Everything else in this was
verbatim from the email. Clearly this individual hit “send” before proofreading for message accuracy.
How likely would you be to set up a call with this person, and get the “run day” rather than the “run
down”?
Speaking professionally and articulately has the same impact. As a starting point, try to eliminate “filler”
words from your speech, like “um” and “like”. Um, how credible does, like, someone sound if they, like,
constantly use, um, fillers and, you know, stuff like that. On your next webinar, listen to the speaker and
see how many times they use such filler words, then evaluate how confident you feel about the content
you just received. The material may be spot on, but if the delivery is poor, not only does your attention
span plummet, but your confidence in the accuracy of the material dives as well. Make sure you are not
that presenter.
Record your next presentation, or purposely listen to how you are speaking at your next meeting. Re-
read last week’s emails that you sent out. Evaluate for messaging power and effectiveness, considering
grammar and word selection. Put those communication skills down as a requirement. There are many
webinars on effective business writing and public speaking. From personal experience, Toastmasters has
greatly enhanced my confidence in both planned and impromptu speaking. I rarely use “um” in my daily
speech, and that has given my opinions more weight with my professional superiors, and led to a
speaking engagement at a national conference for our company. I have been able to deal with a specific
conflict with a vendor over the phone calmly, directly and professionally, while preserving the vendor
relationship, because my speaking style is thoughtful, deliberate, and confident, with no filler words. I
have been able to smooth out misunderstandings between my employees and other departments in a
single email, because my intervening response on behalf of my employee has been thought out with
carefully and purposefully chosen words, and has been proofread for tone and message intent. Written
and spoken communication can be powerful tools in advancing your career if refined and used properly,
and can stall or halt your career completely if minimized or ignored.
Creating a Scope Statement Now that you have your detailed requirements, you can create your scope statement; those tasks that
will be completed in your 1-3 year phase, your 3-5 year phase, and your soft skills to get you to Your
Dream Job interview. This will be your initial scope statement, and will be validated and finalized after
you create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), a schedule, and a budget. At this end of this planning
process and at the end of this paper, you will have a final scope statement, an accurate budget, and a
realistic, well-balanced schedule against which you can execute to make you the most perfect candidate
possible for Your Dream Job.
Your scope statement should reflect the tasks that you will complete to make you the perfect candidate
for Your Dream Job, following the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic, and Time-
bound) methodology. It should not be “I want to be a speaker on Cloud”. It should take Your Dream Job
title (your charter) and call out the requirements and steps that you just spent all that time researching.
If you crafted the Dream Job Title as “Though Leader and Evangelist on Cloud and Internet of Things”,
your scope statement may looks something like “I will become a paid speaker on Cloud and Internet of
Things. I will accomplish this by elevating my current Jazzy Speaker certification to Silver-Jazzy Speaker,
adding Internet of Things and two vendors’ associate-level Cloud credentials to my technical
2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 15
certification list, and joining the local chapter of Young Cloud Developers Association in 1-3 years. In 3-5
years, I will offer my candidacy as an officer in the Young Cloud Developers Association, and will craft
presentations that I can deliver at my company’s customer events on Cloud and Internet of Things. Over
the next 3-5 years, I will also attend the annual Super-Mega Cloud Vendor convention held annually in
Las Vegas and begin positioning myself with my industry colleagues as an IoT thought leader, so as to
start finding opportunities for speaking engagements outside of my company. ” Clearly, some of those
specifics in that scope statement are completely made up, but you get the idea. The actions itemized in
the scope statement are in direct support of The Dream Job title, your charter, and the actions are
specific and time-bound so you can hold yourself accountable to achieving them. The scope statement
helps you wrap your head around exactly what you want to do and when, so you can keep marching
towards the Dream Job Title.
Now that you have your scope statement, we can get down to the essential effort it will take to get
there. What exactly do you need to do to fulfill the requirements you have just defined. In project
management terms, this is known as creating a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and a WBS Dictionary.
A WBS itemizes the specific items that are required to accomplish the scope, and the WBS Dictionary
defines the work to be done to produce that item. For example, a component of the WBS may be “EMC
ISM certification”, and WBS Dictionary entries for that WBS component would be “attend the class,
study for the exam and take the test”. The WBS has nouns, accomplishments you will deliver, and the
WBS Dictionary has verbs, actions you will take to create those deliverables. The WBS is also hierarchical
in nature. It takes the requirements that you have established and breaks them down into smaller and
smaller components, pre-requisites if you will, until you have a specific deliverable that supports the
requirement, and can be accomplished in a relatively small amount of time, typically 40-80 hours. Think
of your WBS as what you will be delivering, and the WBS Dictionary as the actions required to deliver it.
It also helps to have your WBS organized in some kind of numbering system that cross-references with
your WBS Dictionary, so you understand what specific activity will be required for each deliverable. It
must contain ALL the work and ONLY the work required to complete the tasks laid out in the scope and
fulfill the charter; get done specifically what you have outlined in your scope so you are The Perfect
Candidate for Your Dream Job.
In this circumstance, the hierarchical nature of the WBS is extremely helpful. Your certification
requirements may have pre-requisites, and those pre-requisites may have pre-requisites, and all of
those must be fulfilled. For example, you may want to have a certain expert-level certification, but that
may first require you to have an associate-level certification which may require you to sit in a class to be
eligible to take the associate-level cert exam. Or you may want to working on your speaking skills to
deliver technical presentations, but you have to complete ten speeches covering basic skills first. In this
case, a picture is worth a thousand words. Let’s use a specific example.
Let’s say that two of the requirements you have decided on are your Cisco DataCenter CCNP (DC-CCNP)
certification and your VMware Data Center Virtualization (VCP6-DCV) certification. The one certification,
DC-CCNP, consists of 4 exams, and has a pre-requisite of the DataCenter CCNA (DC-CCNA) certification,
which itself consists of 2 exams. The second certification, VCP6-DCV, requires a VCP class, and then in
order, the vSphere 6 Foundations exam and the VCP exam. Further, it is recommended that you take the
Foundations class to prepare for the exam. So, your WBS may look something like this.
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The corresponding WBS Dictionary can be in any format you like, but should at the very least, contain
the reference number from your WBS, the name of the WBS element (the work package), the activities
required to complete the work package, and the number of hours estimated to complete it. So, if we
take the VMware certification portion of this WBS, the WBS Dictionary for the VMware certification may
look like this:
Ref # Work Package Activity required # hrs
2 VCP6-DCV Cert VCP class, VCP exam, vSphere Foundations exam 244
2.1 VCP Class Attend required VCP class 40
2.1.1 Foundations class Attend recommended vSphere Foundations class 40
2.1.2 Foundations exam Study for and take vSphere Foundations exam 82
2.2 VCP exam Study for and take VCP exam 82
Notice that for the top level work package, reference #2 the VCP6-DCV cert, corresponding hours tally is
a sum of the hours required for each work package activity underneath it.
In creating your WBS, do not forget to include activity that may be required to maintain a certification.
Many certifications either expire or require updates or maintenance every so often to maintain their
currency and keep your own knowledge current and relevant. So make sure you are taking into account
not only the initial outlay of time and effort to earn the certification, but ongoing effort to keep it up to
date. For example, let’s look at the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. This is a
globally-recognized certification that requires 35 hours of classroom time, a 4-year degree, and 3500
hours of project management experience (or a secondary degree and 7500 hours of project
management experience) in order to apply to sit for the 4-hour exam. Once attained, to maintain that
certification and not have to re-take the exam, you have to earn 60 Professional Development Units
(PDUs) every 3 years. That means over the course of a 3-year cycle, you need to complete and document
60 hours of specific project management activities, and a certain number of minimum PDUs must be
Dream Job Title
1 DC-CCNP certification
1.1 DCUC-D exam
1.1.1 DC-CCNA certification
1.1.1.1 DCICN exam
1.1.1.2 DCICT exam
1.2 DCUF-D exam
1.3 DCUC-I exam
1.4 DCUF-I exam
2 VCP6-DCV certification
2.1 VCP class
2.1.1 Foundations
class
2.1.2 Foundations
exam
2.2 VCP exam
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claimed in specific categories. So, if earning your PMP is on your list of requirements for Your Dream Job
title, make sure that you account for those 60 hours after certification attainment in your planning.
Keeping your credentials current can mean the difference between being unemployed for 2 months or 2
years after being laid off. I have a good friend who was fired, but because he kept all of his certifications
up to date, both technical and soft skills, he was able to find a new job, with better pay, better working
conditions, and more in line with his long-term career goals, within 8 weeks. He was able to nearly write
his own ticket because he made sure that his experience and certifications were current and relevant to
the market. Make sure that you plan time out not only to attain the certifications, but maintenance as
well. Whether it is industry activity, vendor-specific training, or taking a higher level exam along the
same track, make sure that you have a good understanding of not only what is required to attain the
certification but to keep it up to date.
The idea behind this exercise is to have as accurate a representation as possible of true effort required
to get and stay where you need to be to support your charter, Your Dream Job Title, and also to verify if
the first draft of your scope statement you just created is truly reasonable. Remember, project planning
is intended to be iterative. Now that you have a grasp on what the effort will be to achieve and maintain
each of the requirements, go back and take a look at your scope statement for refinement. Does
something have to be moved from 1-3 years to 3-5 years? Is there a requirement that you can now take
a closer look at and perhaps it is not as important as it may have been? Is the certification maintenance
effort in the 1-3 year or 3-5 year bucket? Remember, the WBS must include EVERYTHING needed to
fulfill the charter of Your Dream Job and is the tool you can use to make sure that ONLY what you need
to fulfill the charter is being done. Now is your opportunity to take a hard look at the requirements you
have built and re-assess what was added unnecessarily or what has been left out. Since the WBS
includes all the work and only the work needed to meet the charter of Your Dream Job title, this
particular portion of the planning should take a good chunk of time. Set aside at least a full day or two to
really analyze the requirements and resulting work packages. Make sure that not only have you included
ALL of the work, but ONLY the work necessary. This tool is critical to help keep you focused and on track,
so use it to its fullest potential.
Now that you have a grasp on what needs to be done and how much effort is required, you can start
creating a schedule; your timeline of dates by which you will accomplish milestones from your WBS.
Your schedule is going to be based on the numbers used to build out the effort required when creating
your WBS Dictionary. The difference between effort and a schedule is that a schedule takes real life into
account.
Let’s go back to our previous rule of thumb; 2 hours of self-study for every hour of classroom time to
prepare for a technical exam. Now, assume that reasonably, most adults can stay focused at 2 hours at a
clip; after which most people find themselves drifting off or reading the same page 4 and 5 times.
Factor in the assumption that your employer will want you to still perform some portion of your day job
and may only grant you about 2 hours per day of study time. Let’s also assume that you can dedicate 2
hours per day or 10 hours per week after-hours, at home, studying on your own. Then roughly estimate
if your goals are reasonable. For example, let’s assume that you have decided in your initial discovery
that a Cisco Route/Switch CCNA is one of the certs that will complement your VNX TA in delivering a
converged solution. Route/Switch CCNA is divided into 2 exams, and each exam has a 40-hour class
recommended to prepare for the exam. There are two weeks dedicated to classroom time alone. Then,
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using the rule of thumb (2 hours of self-study for every hour of classroom time), you now have 80 hours,
or 2 solid, heads-down studying weeks to prepare for each of the two exams. Factor in that, reasonably,
you will get 4 hours of concrete studying in per day, between on-the-job time and after-hours time, and
you are now at 5 calendar weeks to prepare for each exam. (One solid week of class, 4 weeks of 4 hours
per day of studying) multiplied by two, you are looking at 10 weeks to prepare for the certification. Let’s
assume that your team happens to focus on VCE, and you have decided that VMware VCP certification
would also be good. This requires another 40-hour class, then using our math logic above, 2 hours for
every hour of classroom time, 80 hours, reasonably spread across 4 weeks for studying, you factor in
another 5 weeks. If you have put a goal in front of you to add what you have determined are base level
engineering certs for VCE in one quarter, Route/Switch CCNA and VCP, unless your company will allow
you to be completely offline studying for the next quarter, you cannot squeeze 15 weeks of work into a
12-week quarter. Make sure your goal is reasonable. This specific example should be a 6-month goal,
not a 3-month goal, to not only allow for regular employment duties and outside personal
responsibilities, but to account for things beyond your control like training vendor class availability and
surprise projects, to make the goal achievable.
When defining the technical certification portion of your scope, I cannot stress enough the importance
of balance. Make sure that you are being honest and reasonable with your time and your study style.
Perhaps you will be able to take extended periods of time and study for 8-10 hours straight. Perhaps you
are that type of disciplined person that can put their head down for 6 hours in a technical training
manual and think nothing of it. And perhaps you are not. If you travel, are you really able to get quality
study time on a plane? The more genuine, honest, and sincere you are with what your learning style is
and what your study habits and available study time are, the more reasonable your schedule will be for
success and for your sanity. The last thing you want to do is set a goal in front of you that is set up for
failure from the start. Keep in mind that Your Career is your project. You own every piece of this, so why
not set yourself up for success, and declare a milestone date that is truly attainable?
Make sure in crafting your schedule, that you take your stakeholder needs into account. Your employer
may only allow, as a standard, your lunch hour for studying. If you need to carve more than a lunch hour
out of your day to study, talk to your boss and sell your path to them. If you have done the initiating
phase and requirements planning phase, and can articulate exactly what you are asking for and why,
you may be surprised by the reward you can realize. Here is where your WBS becomes a very useful
tool. Most employers want engaged and thoughtful employees, because those are the types of workers
who most effectively contribute to the bottom line. Even “bad” managers should appreciate that you
asked for specific support in a well thought out manner. By being able to correlate your defined
requirements to your current job and the immediate future with your WBS, and being able to articulate
exactly how much effort is required to keep your position and the department successful with your WBS
dictionary, you may find your employer more amenable to managing your request of additional study
time during working hours. You may also find out about large projects that are coming your way or
other factors that will impact your schedule one way or the other. An open and focused conversation
with your boss more than likely will aid and direct your cause to a path of success. Use your WBS to back
up your information and make the discussion focused and fruitful. Remembering that the WBS is
intended to keep you focused on the tasks and only the tasks required to complete your charter, it is
also a tool that can be used to sell your certification path, especially if you have correlated your initial
scope statement to your current job. The WBS and the WBS dictionary are documents that cover the
2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 19
tasks and only the tasks to complete your charter. By bringing that focus and specificity to the
conversation, you are demonstrating thoughtful planning that can help both you and your company
realize, and possibly have the ability to monetize, the value of your chosen path.
Take your family and personal time into account as well. If you cannot get time during the workday to
study and meet the experience or soft skill needs, you will need the support of your family and friends.
Make sure that you keep all of the demands on your time in the front of your mind. As I mentioned
before, I distinctly remember studying for my Cisco Route/Switch CCNA exam while my son played in the
bathtub, but I had to get buy-in from my husband that he was comfortable with me multi-tasking like
that. Make sure that all of your stakeholders know what you need to be successful. If you need to go
downstairs and lock yourself in the home office for 2 hours a night, tell your co-habitants that is what
you require, even if “help” is simply defined as staying out of the way for a few hours a night and silently
sliding granola bars under the door. If your speaking organization meets for 2 hours on Wednesday
nights and that is your night to cook dinner, make sure you have arrangements made ahead of time.
This may seem very basic and trivial, but seemingly small things are the ones that trip you up when you
fail to plan for them. Involve your whole support system, professional and personal, so you remove as
much stress ahead of time and can move forward knowing people are taken care of and support you.
When you are crafting your schedule, once again, do not forget about the maintenance we discussed
earlier. Make sure that you are scheduling for that defined ongoing effort to maintain the credential.
Many times you do not get notification that something is about to expire until 30 days prior to the
expiration date in the form of a canned email from an unmonitored alias that at first glance you may
discard without reading. That notice may be your only notice. If you are like most technical
professionals, your time is scheduled 30-60 days out and may not have any “extra” time available for
required maintenance activities. So be aware of expirations and due dates, circle the due dates on the
calendar, carve the time out for that maintenance, and hold that time sacred. After all of the work you
put into achieving a credential, the last thing you want to do is let it expire.
Once you assemble a reasonable schedule, considering your day job, your normal work duties and your
personal life, you then want to ask about the big elephant in the room…how all of this get paid for.
Many times, vendors and distributors have education incentive programs, creative payment options or a
standard bucket of funding available specifically for training and certification. These funding options are
sometimes the best kept secret for a company because nobody asks for them. Investigate those options
and ask your vendor or distributor about funding options. If you want your company to pay for the
certifications out of pocket, have your salesperson hat on and really sell the value of the certification.
Find the contract that they would lose or win based on you holding a given certification. See if there is a
partner level or pricing promotion that the company can participate in if you hold a given certification.
Think like a CFO and determine if there is an ROI that you can tie to your request. Having that ROI
associated with the certifications in your WBS will enable a much easier sell.
If your employer or vendor partner has no method available to you for paying for classes and/or exams,
you will need to look at your personal budget. This may present the largest impact on your schedule and
goals. For example, when I was going through the process to earn my Project Management Professional
(PMP) certification, my company was willing to pay for my required 35 hour classtime, (about $1500) my
$139 Project Management Institute membership fee and my $405 exam. I was therefore able to achieve
PMP certification in less than a year, after completing the required 3500 project hours. My husband,
2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 20
however had a bit more of a challenging time in scheduling the class and putting in study hours for his
PMP certification, because his company paid for nothing, and gave him no time during the workday to
study. Our family didn’t have to worry about budget for my PMP, but we certainly had to account for
time and money to pay for my husband’s. If you must pay for something out of pocket and will not get
reimbursed for it, take that into account. Depending on the cost and availability of your own funds, you
may need to adjust your schedule for that particular class.
When having conversations with your stakeholders around scheduling and funding, you may need to
break your approval requests into chunks that are manageable for your audience. Your employer may
only want 6 month goals, so they can correlate accomplishments with annual and semi-annual review
times. Your family may only be able to budget money or time 3 months out. Which is why you spent so
much time on the WBS, and why the WBS is critical to success. Aren’t you glad now that you spent that
time determining exactly the effort required? Makes budgeting the time and the money for it a whole
lot easier. And it makes getting buy-in for interim deliverables that much easier to speak about and sell
to your stakeholders.
Take the DC-CCNP example from our WBS previously. Your employer has a policy of paying for classes
and exams for certifications. If you had not done your WBS on that task, you may have simply asked for
the company to pay for a class and a certification, and they would have said yes. However, the most the
company will pay for is $5000 per quarter. When you start diving into the requirements to schedule that
already approved class, essentially creating your WBS and WBS dictionary after the fact, you discover
that you in fact have 4 classes and exams, not just one; $5000 will only cover 2 of the 4 recommended
classes, and none of the 4 exams, plus you have 2 exams and classes that are pre-requisites. Your
request just went from what you thought was one class and on exam easily within budget and
timeframe of one quarter, to now 6 exams, 3x the budget, and easily 3-4x the timeframe. Going back
after the approval and asking for more time and money may not be so easy. See why taking the time at
the very beginning and creating that WBS not only clarifies exactly the work required to meet the goal,
but allows you to negotiate and get buy-in from your stakeholders? If you know that all of the effort will
run between $15k and $20K, you can go into the meeting with your boss armed with concrete
information and can start immediate negotiations around scheduling and funding, so you can get started
right away. Same thing with your family. You are not telling them you are going in for a loaf of bread and
coming out with 4 grocery bags. You are going in with a list and sticking to it. Having that WBS makes it
easier to keep the budget and schedule as you move down the path, and break it into manageable
chunks for your audience, if necessary. Knowing the full scope of effort will allow you to know and
negotiate to reasonable break points, to divide the project into manageable phases with deliverables
and milestones at the end of each phase, and allow you and your stakeholder, employer, or family, the
opportunity to assess progress and determine access to further funding and schedule flexibility for you
to continue down the path to completion.
Validating and Finalizing the Scope Now that you have an accurate representation of effort required, the timeline required to accomplish
your goals and how things will be funded, you can set about validating your scope and getting it
finalized. Recall that your scope is what will be done to achieve the objective of The Dream Job. The
WBS defines all the work and only the work required to achieve that objective and now that you have
2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 21
defined the work, schedule, budget, and have determined that the work is in fact reasonable and
achievable with the support of your stakeholders, you can finalize the scope and start executing.
A brief word about your final scope statement around Your Career and Your Dream Job. You should feel
that your final scope statement should be difficult or impossible to change. The idea is to create the final
scope and deny yourself permission ahead of time to discard a requirement, whether it is a certification
or an experience, at a later time because it proves to be too hard at that moment. Final project scopes
should be held sacred and should be difficult to change, because the scope is intended to directly
support the charter of Your Dream Job, which should never change. The only reason a requirement
should be discarded is if it no longer has value either to your career or to the industry. You have put
considerable time and effort, as outlined throughout this paper, into properly estimating how long in
calendar days your tasks will take and what sort of money and effort you need to outlay to complete
those tasks.
Therefore, by nature the final scope should be reasonable and you should have no issue keeping
yourself accountable to meeting the deadlines that you are creating. Yes, these deadlines are of your
own creation based on your own research and planning. You are the project manager of Your Career, so
you fully own the success or failure of all of the activities and deadlines that YOU have created. By
approaching your final scope, and kicking off the activities you have laid out before you, with the
mindset that the deadlines are written in stone, you can hold yourself accountable to meeting those
deadlines. And, if you have done the planning properly, with reasonable estimates and full disclosure to
and buy-in from your stakeholders, finalizing the scope and holding those milestones sacred should not
be intimidating in the least. If you plan the requirements, schedule and budget properly, and get buy-in
from all your stakeholders, including yourself, The Dream Job should be reasonable and achievable, thus
paving the way for success.
Once you create your final scope statement, write it down and post it. I can’t stress this enough. Perhaps
the Harvard Business School study, that revealed only 3% achieve a goal when it is not written down vs
80% do achieve the goal when it is written down, is an urban myth, but there is some element of truth in
it. Physically writing something down on an actual piece of paper, in ink, lends a certain air of
permanence and legality to it. Therefore, write your scope statement down and post it clearly in at least
2 places. One, prominently at your workplace, wherever that may be. If you are a road warrior, write it
on an index card and tape it to your laptop. Post it on your cubicle or office wall at eye level or on your
monitor. Someplace in your daily work environment where you cannot miss it every time you log into
your system or sit down at your desk. The second place is on the inside door of your bathroom mirror or
vanity, inside the cupboard door where you keep your coffee mug, or someplace that you see every
time you get ready to start the day. Write it on a brightly colored piece of paper for both places, so your
eye is drawn to it. My least favorite color is orange. My goals and scope statement are written on bright
orange index cards and because the color is so obnoxious to me, I can’t help but notice it. The reason
you are posting it in a somewhat obtrusive place is to remind yourself to hold yourself accountable to
your crafted goals and do something every day towards fulfilling your scope. Remember, you are the
most important stakeholder in this whole process, and ultimately, as Brad said before “it doesn’t matter
to me. Just pick what you want to be known for and go for it.” So remind yourself to go for it every day.
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Conclusion We have now reached the end of our process. You should, at this point, have a few items, which we
have walked through developing in this paper.
1. A personal charter in the form of a Dream Job Title or function.
2. A summary plan of how to position yourself for that Dream Job in the form of your scope
statement, written down and posted.
3. Specific requirements to make that Dream Job happen in the form of a WBS.
4. Specific tasks to accomplish those requirements from your WBS dictionary.
5. A realistic schedule and budget to complete those tasks.
6. Buy in on your requirements, budget and schedule from your employer and your family.
7. Most importantly, buy-in from the most critical stakeholder…YOU.
Your Dream Job means absolutely nothing if you are not on board with everything you have just laid out.
You took the time to follow this whole initiating and planning process outlined in this paper, to move
your career forward. Now, it is up to you to execute the plan, hold yourself accountable, and monitor
and control your progress. When you are ready to close the tasks and the charter that is Your Dream
Job, you should be positioned and prepared to be that person you saw at the very beginning of this
process; the one that solves the next vexing problem for your customer in five sentences or less.
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