The Project Management Institute (PMI) is the world's leading project management organisation with almost 700,000 global members and 325 local chapters internationally. The UK chapter is entirely volunteer-led and provides a range of benefits to our 3,000 PMI UK members - as well as the wider profession and project economy.

Of course we can simply list all the benefits of being a member of the global PMI organisation, and better still PMI UK Chapter (and we have done…), but we wanted to pick out just 3 REALLY good reasons to join.

Firstly, the resources. DID YOU KNOW… members have free access to all PMI's Foundational & Practice Standards and Guidelines? That's everything – from the latest version of the PMBOK® Guide, through to individual standards for Program and Portfolio Management and Governance, including the new Organisational Project Management Standard. And that's not to mention standards and practice guidelines for Risk, Agile, Benefits Realisation, Business Analysis, Requirements Managing, Managing in Complexity and many more.

If you want inspirational examples, look no further than the bi-monthly PM Network, and if you want to support your case with peer-reviewed research then search PMI's academic Project Management Research journal. All searchable and free to members.

PLUS www.projectmanagement.com (formerly gantthead.com) is part of the PMI family. Just another website? Not at all – the site has 14,000 top class articles, and, highly relevant from a practical point of view, over 1000 templates, including plans, presentations, and checklists. Some of these are available to the general project management community, but PMI members get premium content free.

Secondly, practical professional development. DID YOU KNOW… LinkedIn has over 740 million registered members, including 55 million companies? And there are 1bn interactions with the platform each month. Users, however, spend an average of only 17 minutes per month on the platform. You may know this. But what you may not know is how to leverage your usage of the platform. Members of the PMI UK Chapter benefit from free workshops from subject matter leaders. At two recent online workshops LinkedIn expert Mark White (11 years' full-time experience of leveraging the platform) showed in detail how to make best use of the tool, creating a personal brand, creating engagement, and networking to identify and capitalise on opportunities.

And that's not the only workshop coming up: over the course of June and July. There are additional workshops on Design Thinking and Influencing over authority, hot topics in project management in 2021, with many more workshops scheduled. These are for members only, however there is an ongoing and outstanding series of webinars open to all members of the project management community.

How good are these? Well just as the author joined the volunteer team behind PMI UK's digital events, the team won second prize in a prestigious events industry award. Despite the fact that the Digital Events team is almost wholly volunteer-based, they certainly know how to project manage! And this award was won against multi-$100m professional events companies.

And if you are new to the project management field then the PMI UK Chapter offers truly excellent opportunities to learn new skills, gain experience and take on marketable responsibilities. Our volunteers are at this moment developing their skills in many aspects of IT, social media marketing, events organisation, video production, writing and many more areas. There are always openings for new volunteers in a highly interesting and supportive environment.

And for the experienced professional, the UK chapter is a real community, with many opportunities to share experience, meet with fellow professionals, and support the newer project generation.

Thirdly? Let's be practical – it costs less than £100 per annum to become a member of the PMI, or £22 as a student, and you can save that almost straight away in discounts on certifications, courses, and publications.

Joining the UK Chapter is currently free for the first year (mail jodi.walker@pmi.org for your Chapter Guest Pass code), and costs c.£28 per annum afterwards.

It was hard for us to decide which of the many benefits of membership we should feature here. Join now and you can discover for yourself everything we have to offer. Whether you're simply looking for PDUs to maintain a certification, or whether you're interested in our engagement with the forthcoming COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, there's something for the entire project community. If you're not yet a member of the PMI then just click here to join, or if you're already a PMI member, just ask for your first year's free membership code. We're looking forward to welcoming you.

About the author 

Dr Rick Graham PMP is a project management consultant with a background in the pharmaceutical industry. He is currently working with clients on large rail and communications programs. He is a member of the Digital Events Team within the PMI UK Chapter and can be contacted at rick@benchmarkskills.co.uk