plan a path to your dream job - dell · competent communicator, and earned my project management...

Sharon March, PMPManager, Cisco Technical Team Avnet Technology [email protected]

PLAN A PATH TO YOUR DREAM JOB

2016 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2

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.


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


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?


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.


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”.


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


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


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


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


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.


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.


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


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


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.


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


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,


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


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,


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


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.


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.

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is

subject to change without notice.

THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED “AS IS.” EMC CORPORATION MAKES NO

RESPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS

PUBLICATION, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS

FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable

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