PMI Spain Chapter: Interesting Thought: Why to volunteer?

We had elections today at PMI Madrid Spain Chapter.
I've been elected as member of the new Board of Directors, a new interesting challenge for me.

PMI objective is to promote Project Management as a profession. One of the outgoing Board members expressed a thought that I found very interesting: Being part of an association like this has mainly 2 big motivations. Both of these motivations have pros and cons and do not need to be necessarily bad. The first is to help winning some new business, the second to grow in ones own company. I do not necessary agree with the statement, but there is some truth in it I can't deny.

There is also the possibility that the motivation is simply to network with the goal of professional and personal growth.

Regarding localization or globalization, I believe Professional Project Management is not very popular in Language Providers here in Spain. I do not believe there was anybody else from the GILT industry in the meeting today. I ignore if there are people from the industry participating in PMI Spain. It's kind of sad, in a way I believe it shows that Spain's a little behind in project management maturity at least in what the globalization industry is concerned.

I hope to be able to convince more people from Spain of the importance of project management professionalism in our industry. In today's competitive world, and for Spanish which is spoken in many countries besides Spain, Project Management can be a real and tangible added value. In fact I believe it is imprescindible if you want to provide a good service. Not only Multilingual Service Providers will benefit from it. But there are not so many MLVs in Spain after all.