Little bit of advice needed here please.

I work in an the offshore industry and while im happy at the moment im looking to the future and where i want my career to go. To that end i was looking at starting online courses in project management. Luckily i get a lot of hands on projects working both individually and as a team leader so the practacal experience is pretty much as good as i can get at the moment.

Now the important bit – Are the Prince2 qualifications well recognised and how are they recieved by employers. Im not wanting to throw cash away on a qualificatin that is worth as much as the paper it is printed on.

Many thanks…..

It's the standard for most public sector projects, and in turn any private companies that have any dealings with the public sector tend to have adopted it too. Lots of private sector firms have gone that way as well.

Outside Europe though it's not well recognised – so if you're aiming for a job with a big US/international megacorp PMI might be worth a look instead. If you want to work on projects in the UK, PRINCE2 is probably the better bet.

As above, well used in public sector but if you are currently in offshore then doubt you would want to be lokoing at public sector salaries!

As above it is becoming like a template in the 'desirable' section for middle management CS adverts around the 30k mark, below than not needed above experience is more relevant.

cheers for the replies. Might do some more asking around to see if it would benefit me in the long run.

It is pretty much the standard PM method in IT.

I'm a practioner and while I've never had cause to use prince I and most other p
PMs on the course thought that there was a lot of stuff on it that could take away and adapt…

Ditto here Civil Service (MoD) here.

Also pushing the APM Qualifications

http://www.apm.org.uk/page.asp?categoryID=0

A colleague and I are about to do the practitioner five day course. Went on a seminar last week. It's about £ 1000 all in at the moment so it's a good time to do it. From the seminar it all looks pretty common sense, anyone with any project management experience should be pretty familiar with the concepts, it's just the terminology you need to get your head around. I'm purely doing it for the CV, no chance what so ever of using it properly where I work, principle number one, have an viable business case as you move forward – FAIL.

It's becoming a pre-requisite for many project management type jobs and as I said it actually looks quite sensible in it's approach. We're looking to do it through a training provider called SPOCE.

As others have said its the certificate most public and private sector employers are looking for so its essential for your CV.

In practice your unlikely to use it, sure the guiding principals are typically used but in the real world each company has their own methods of project management. Most cherry pick the bits they want to use and drop the rest.

at my place it appears to be a CV filler..every business analyst wants to go on the course and stick it on their CV but when it comes to do doing the job none of it gets put into practice.

I know DHL like it, if logistics is your thing…