John McIntyre
Founder, HotPMO
Every month I trawl through the research papers, reports, and podcasts so you don’t have to. Here’s what caught my eye this month.
Americo Pinto, who leads PMI’s PMO Global Alliance, opened a post in August with a phrase most of us have used about our own jobs: “I work in the PMO”. To him that is “a location, not a professional identity”. We gave this month’s PMO HotHouse a careers slant, and most of the news came back to what a PMO career looks like and who gets to start one.
PMO work now passes the test of a profession, argues PMI’s PMO lead
In his post on the PMI blog, Pinto sets out four conditions for a profession, all of which have to hold at the same time: a community of practice, knowledge that is written down instead of passed on by whoever trained you, a way to verify that someone has that knowledge, and a career path that lets people build something inside the field. “Miss one and you have an occupation, not a profession.” His conclusion is that PMO work now meets all four.
Pinto has an interest here. He founded the PMO Global Alliance, which PMI acquired in 2023, and he led the development of PMI’s PMO certification, which the post goes on to recommend.
I’m firmly in the yes camp. I see the community he describes every month at the House of PMO, the knowledge is written down, and there are ways to verify it.
He also draws a line between PMO and project work that matches my own move from one to the other. “Project delivery trains you to close ambiguity fast,” he writes, while “PMO work requires you to stay inside it long enough to understand what people actually need.” Staying beyond the end of the project, with a foot in both camps, is one of the things I love about PMO work.
Try his four-part test on your own organisation. If the only career path your PMO people can see leads out of the PMO, that is the condition you’re missing.
Government’s delivery career map stops PMO roles two grades short of the top
Alison Baptiste is the new Head of Profession and Deputy Head of Function for Project Delivery across government, and the Government Project Delivery site ran a profile of her at the end of August. She trained as a civil engineer (“engineers do projects!”) and worked in Nepal and Indonesia before joining the public sector at the Environment Agency.
She calls the people working at practitioner and foundation levels the “engine room” of delivery, and names them: benefits managers, risk managers, planners, business case writers, analysts, project managers and many others. I was a little miffed that the PMO didn’t get its own mention and ended up in “many others”. I’ll forgive her, because she is giving credit to the people who make delivery happen.
The profession publishes a career map too, the Project Delivery Capability Framework, with role profiles by Civil Service grade. I winced when I went through it for the PMO. The PMO Manager/Director pathway runs from Grade 7 to SCS 1, the first grade of the Senior Civil Service. Project and programme roles go on to SCS 3, and portfolio roles to SCS 2. There are three PMO role profiles against seven for project managers, and they are fairly light on what a PMO does.
Chart: HotPMO, drawn from the role profiles in the Project Delivery Capability Framework, September 2026.
For PMO competencies I’d point you to the House of PMO’s PMO Competency Framework instead. The two map onto each other cleanly, but the House of PMO version is richer on the work we do around for the organisation as a whole, which the government framework tends to pass over.
Asked what superpower she would give project delivery professionals for a week, Baptiste chose the power to “move forward in time and step into the shoes of the people who will use or benefit from their project”, then come back with that insight. PMOs already have a version of it. We stay longer than any single project, so we have seen earlier projects come and go, and we can show today’s teams how the last one landed with the people it was for.
Put that to work before the next project in a familiar area starts: take what the last comparable one delivered for its users into the kick-off.
US employers rehire after AI cuts as UK staff outpace their AI policies, surveys find
We’ve all spent the year worrying about AI taking our jobs, and Robert Half’s research shows some of that going into reverse: 32% of US hiring managers who cut roles after bringing in AI have since added them back. Its labour market update gives the reasons. The reinstated roles needed institutional knowledge AI couldn’t replace (40%), relationship management it couldn’t replicate (39%), more capacity as demand grew (39%), and more human oversight and quality control than expected (38%).
AI needs managing. It needs controlling and oversight, and it needs someone who is responsible for it. That matches what I’ve seen on LinkedIn: early in the year PMO roles were like hen’s teeth, and more are coming back now. A lot of PMO work is tacit, the communication and the reporting, and above all the human politics, which AI doesn’t do yet.
Deloitte’s first GenAI Workforce Survey, of 25,000 UK workers, splits the workforce roughly into thirds: 32% say it saves them some time each week, 31% use it at work without saving any, and 37% haven’t used it at work at all. My guess is that the middle group are using it to explore things they wouldn’t otherwise try, or to add quality and depth.
Deloitte also asked employees who use GenAI at work about their employer’s policy: 44% say there is one, 36% know where to find it, 33% know what it says, and 28% think it is clear and up to date.
Chart: HotPMO, drawn from the Deloitte UK GenAI Workforce Survey, 2026. Base: employees who use GenAI for work.
Project managers are the group I’d watch. They work in a project environment, they see themselves as different to everyone else, and they can pull their own tools in. With its governance and assurance hats on, the PMO is the obvious place to make sure the project world follows the same standards as the rest of the organisation.
Ask three of your project managers where the AI policy is and what it says. If they can’t tell you, the PMO has an assurance job to do before anyone proposes cutting roles for AI.
Graduate vacancies fall to a record low on Adzuna’s count
Adzuna’s latest figures put UK graduate vacancies at 8,383 in July, a record low and 45.6% down on a year earlier. In mid-2017, by Adzuna’s count, there were more than 55,000. Entry-level roles fell too, to 192,864, down 8.1%.
Adzuna counts job adverts, so read the drop with some care. Graduate jobs expert Charlie Ball told the BBC the market is weak but has “not collapsed”, and suggested part of the fall may be employers no longer advertising roles as graduate roles. Deloitte’s CFO survey puts cost control ahead of AI as the main reason firms are hiring fewer graduates, though AI came second.
It picks up a thread from earlier editions. In July Lindsay asked where the next generation of PMO talent will come from if AI takes on the admin, and in August consulting firms were weighing up how their juniors learn the human side of the job.
I think bringing through the next generation is one of the great parts of PMO work, and administrator and analyst roles have long been one way into project careers. Check when your PMO last hired at entry level. If it was before your organisation brought in AI, make sure someone decided to stop.
Frequent job movers settle into new roles faster – time to rethink your PMO hiring strategy?
Job hopping has long been a red flag on a CV. Rebecca Kehoe and F. Scott Bentley tracked 8,693 US hedge fund managers across 2,129 firms from 2004 to 2019, and found that most people’s performance dips when they change employer: 72% did, and took around four months to recover. Managers with four or more previous moves were back to their old level in about two months, against five for people who had moved once or twice.
The authors put the difference down to adaptability that comes with practice: reading a new culture quickly, forming relationships and working out the unwritten rules. They say it counts most in roles that depend on collaboration and in teams with strong established cultures, which describes most PMO roles I know. They add their own caveats: once settled in, job hoppers perform much like their colleagues, and the study covers only hedge fund managers moving within one industry. The full paper is in the Academy of Management Journal.
Our world is full of contractors and interims, and plenty of permanent people have jumpy careers too. If you’re a PMO leader rejecting CVs because of job hopping, you may want to rethink that. Look again at the last few you turned down for short stints: for a role that depends on collaboration, a record of settling into new teams quickly may be exactly the evidence you want.
NATS says air traffic control is an overlooked career, then suffers two outages in a month
On 1 September NATS reopened its trainee scheme and reported that one in four jobseekers have never had air traffic control suggested to them as a career. New controllers are posted to its centres at Swanwick in Hampshire or Prestwick in Ayrshire.
A week later, controllers at Swanwick lost access to some live flight data. NATS’s preliminary report traces the failure to “a legacy and previously unknown defect” in a software module, and more than 2,000 flights were delayed, cancelled or diverted. Prestwick followed on 21 September with what NATS called a network connectivity issue, which it says had nothing to do with the first.
On the stream I wondered, tongue in cheek, whether there was a connection. To be fair to NATS, nobody has blamed either failure on staffing, and the CAA’s independent review of the first one is due to report within six months.
As for the lessons learned from the incident? Well, it’s a little early still, but the key one to consider is finding out who signs off changes to the oldest, least-understood parts of your systems, because the first NATS fault sat in legacy code with a defect nobody knew was there. And if you are already operate in this way, and are looking for the next step in your PMO career, there may be a career in air traffic control waiting for you!
October to December: worth leaving your desk for
The House of PMO’s in-person programme carries on through the autumn, and most of these are free.
20 October, Bristol: Lessons from Bristol Airport: Building a Strategic PMO, a morning at Bristol Airport run by Power Framework with the House of PMO, with Eileen Roden among the speakers.
21 October, Manchester: PMO Masterclass: From Data to Decisions, at KPMG in St Peter’s Square, 5.30pm to 8pm.
22 October, Newcastle: AI and the PMO Service Catalogue, at Newcastle Building Society in Wallsend, 5.30pm to 8pm.
16 and 17 November, Edinburgh: the PMO Insight Conference at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, on moving the PMO from reporting to insight and building a PMO that helps decisions get made.
10 December, London and online: Why Every Project Professional Should Spend Time in a PMO, at BCS in Copthall Avenue, 6.30pm to 9pm.
If you missed my talk on AI in the PMO at the London masterclass on 17 September, Lindsay says the recording will be on the House of PMO site for members soon.
You can watch the full session, including the news segment all of this came from, right here:
This roundup is based on my monthly PMO News segment from the PMO HotHouse, run by the House of PMO. If you’re not already part of that community, it’s well worth a look.
If this month has you thinking about your own PMO team, whether that means taking on your first analyst or working out where a PMO career can lead in your organisation, talk to us. Setting up and growing PMO teams is a big part of what we do.
