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Hello everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today I want to start with a sentence I have heard hundreds of times in interviews and career conversations. "I have fifteen years of experience in projects." Every time I hear this, a question shows up in my head, and it is uncomfortable. Is it fifteen years of experience, or is it one year repeated fifteen times? That question is hard because almost nobody can actually answer it. Not the person saying it, and not the person listening. And here lies a huge contradiction in our profession. We measure everything in our projects. We measure cost, time, scope, risk, quality, earned value, and client satisfaction. We have indexes, curves, charts, and dashboards for every one of those things.
And when it comes to the people who run the project, we measure almost nothing. Competence in projects is declared, not measured. Think about how this works today. A resume is a declaration. When someone writes "I led large and complex projects," that tells us almost nothing about what the person can really do. Certifications matter, and I strongly encourage people to get certified, but they prove knowledge at one specific moment, not maturity over time.
The company performance review, when it exists, measures delivery, and delivery depends on many things that are not capability. A project can succeed with an average team and a lot of luck.
And it can fail with an excellent team and a market that turned. The result is that career decisions in projects are made in the dark. In the dark for the person who does not know where to invest the little time they have. And in the dark for the organization, which assigns people based on intuition and personal preference. This is where I think artificial intelligence really changes something. I am not talking about AI writing a schedule or summarizing meeting notes. I am talking about using AI to look at an entire professional path and give back a portrait of it. Something a human reviewer would need hours to do, and that almost no company is willing to pay for. My bet is that competence assessment in projects will stop being a rare and expensive event, the kind that happens once a year if it happens at all, and will become something continuous, cheap, and available to anyone. That changes the game for people who are starting out, for people changing fields, and for people who have been in the same role for twenty years without knowing what to do next. And now I need to be transparent with you.
I helped build a tool that does exactly this, and it is called PM Goal. It came out of our Venture Lab, it is free, and I make absolutely nothing from it. I am talking about it here because it is the most concrete way I have to explain this idea, and because I want the project community to use it. It works like this: you share your resume or the PDF of your LinkedIn profile, and in about two minutes, you get a portrait of your professional maturity. It is organized in three dimensions: people, process, and business. And then it turns into a practical plan for the next thirty, sixty, and ninety days. The address is pmgoal.com. But I do not want the message of this episode to be "use my tool." The message is a different one, and it matters more.
There is a detail in PM Goal that, for me, is the most interesting part of all of this. The result does not come as an exact number. It comes with an explicit uncertainty range. And that should be the standard for any competence assessment made by artificial intelligence. We, who work with projects, understand this better than any other profession. An estimate without a range is a guess wearing the face of precision. It is the same difference between saying that the project costs eight million and saying that it costs between seven and nine and a half.
The second number is less comfortable and much more honest. So let me offer you a test for any AI assessment tool that shows up in front of you, including the one I helped build. Does it show you how much it does not know about you? If it gives you an exact, round score for your professional maturity, be suspicious. And there is one last limit I want to make clear. No number measures courage. No number measures your judgment at three in the morning, when the project is falling apart, and the decision is yours. No number measures what you did for your team during that terrible week that only your team lived through. The value of a portrait like this is not the number. It is the direction.
It helps us choose the next step, never to define how much we are worth. So here is the challenge for this week. We spend our lives measuring projects. When was the last time we measured our own growth? I hope you enjoyed this episode, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
