PMP TrainingPreviously on this blog, we talked about how an understanding of the conditions at your company or in your industry can be a major determining factor in deciding upon the types of software training courses, or online IT training courses, or business analyst training you should seek out to put yourself in a position of strength for new hires or promotion.

What we didn’t talk about yet is the fact that some of the conditions you might want to observe are related to the competition that you will face from your coworkers, your co-competitors, and even your superiors.

Gore Vidal is reputed to have said, “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” It’s an amusing quotation in its own right, but it’s also evocative of the brutal truth. When selecting your institutional and online training courses for the IT industry or for any other profession, it isn’t enough to simply succeed at acquiring the skills you’ve selected for yourself. Your real aim is to acquire better and more industry-relevant skills than anyone who might be up for a similar job as you.

This doesn’t require that you actually wish for others’ failure or try to facilitate that failure. But it should certainly prompt you to recognize when someone else is poised for failure, and to be ready to exploit that.

Let’s take PMP training and certification as an example once again. In the previous post, we talked about how the conditions your business faces might lead you to the conclusion that it’s going to pursue a major technological renovation in the near future, meaning that the skills of a project manager will be at a premium.

In that case, it isn’t always enough to just know that that kind of a change is coming up. You also need to know what talent pool your employers (or prospective employers) have to choose from. What are their current project managers like, and is their current performance up to the challenge of forthcoming projects? Or are they in dire need of further project management training if they want to advance in their field?

If the latter is the case, you open tremendous opportunities for yourself by recognizing both the business conditions and the talent deficiency. At that point you have a chance to head off your competing job seeker, or even your superior, by acquiring the necessary PMP training and certification before he can realize that it’s missing from his career.

Conversely, if you’re trying to hold onto your current position, be sure that no one else is heading you off in this way. You should almost never have to be told that new IT training courses are a necessity for you. If you’ve waited for those kinds of instructions, you should assume that someone else is rushing to acquire the relevant skills ahead of you. Act quickly and make sure that your online IT training courses are the best money can buy, because the only thing that beats being first is being best.