Eight shipbuilders from Newport News Shipbuilding’s future submarine design organization grouped together to study and test for project management certifications.

Engineering Manager Matt Noa (E11) spearheaded the group, deciding that this was the year he would receive his Project Management Professional (PMP) designation.

“It had been on my list for a while,” Noa said. “I got the information for a prep course, and sent an email out to some other people who I thought might be interested.”

Another engineering manager, Brad Boyce (E35), had considered the certification in the past but said that Noa’s invitation made the leap easy.

Boyce said “In terms of preparation, there are a lot of options to choose from. Matt said ‘Hey, let’s do this specific thing,’ and we all jumped.”

The group registered to take the course – which consisted of virtual calls twice a week, from the beginning of February into early April – together.

Since then, everyone has taken and passed their exams.

“The regularity of the online meetings keeps you doing it – there’s accountability there,” Boyce explained.

That accountability helped Ernestine Thompson (E11) push through, even when life tried getting in the way.

“The encouragement from those who were really leaning in, checking in on you, those were the things that I appreciated quite a bit,” she said. “I’m not sure I would have done it by myself, but knowing there were people at work who I could talk to made it a lot easier.”

Despite banding together, each participant agreed that the prep course time commitment was a massive hurdle to overcome. Outside of the video calls, there were up to five hours of modules to complete on their own time.

“It added a lot of intensity to our week-to-week,” Scott Ahearn (E11) said. “It’s long enough that we adjusted, but once it ended, it felt like we were no longer beating ourselves up.”

Carly Hewitt (E11) said that she got in the swing of it all after a while.

“Early on, a lot of the modules are videos so I would just listen to them in my car during my commute. It was a great way to keep up with the material,” she explained. “But later, there are more practice tests than videos. That’s when we had to carve out time at home.”

Another realization for the group came from the language and documentation used in project management, recognizing that many terms, phrases and tools shipbuilders use are not actually shipyard-specific, but industry standard.

“My sister is an IT manager here at the shipyard,” Becky O’Briant (E11) said. “She does Agile every day. She would talk about their process and I was totally lost. Now, I can understand what she means.”

Every member of Noa’s study group felt that the course provided content that they could begin applying immediately.

“There are various tools and techniques that we can apply directly to a lot of the work we are doing,” Noa said. “Of course, not everything is applicable in every scenario, but certainly there are methods that, if we implement them right, will only help us do our jobs better.”

Noa encourages any shipbuilder interested in project management to check out the Project Management Shipbuilders Association (PMSA), which offers resources related to exam preparation, continued professional development for certification maintenance and lunch and learns that take a deep dive into many projects happening across NNS.