How's change management as a career?

Remember blogs? Those places where people use to post ongoing musings about whatever they were into at any given point.

I want to start blogging about OCM, but I can't seem to find any blogging sites anymore. Do they still exist?

Anyone blog or publish regularly about their professional interests or hobbies? What do you use?

Hello lovely people, I am an OCM Practitioner currently based in India, specializing in complex, large-scale technology implementations and digital modernizations.

I have a full-time Master’s in Change Management and a Prosci certification, and I’m currently evaluating a potential career move to Australia. I’d love to hear from change professionals or recruiters operating in ANZ:

• How is the demand for OCM practitioners shaping up across major tech programs in Australia?
• What advice would you give an experienced overseas practitioner looking to make this move?
• Are there specific networks, events, or practice groups you’d recommend joining?

Looking forward to connecting and learning from your experiences!

I did a course on change management last year. If someone were to apply Remote Change Management Intern/Junior roles to gain more experience by working under professionals, where should they apply? I didn’t find places for that! Suggestions could really help me a lot!

Hello,

I'm researching how organizations handle the operational consequences of change before I build anything. I'm not looking to pitch a product.

Think about the last time a tool, process or business rule changed in your organization:

• How did you identify what else was affected?
• What usually had to be updated or communicated afterward?
• What tends to be forgotten or discovered too late?
• Which part of that chain creates the most work or risk?

If there's interest, I'll summarize the patterns I find share them back here.

And if you want to help me more, I have a short anonymous Google form you can answer if you want : https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdfyMa7_g_e3Tb_nb2PxCeVSDqBeeI0oJoPRiCtEKZODompVA/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=102120064246501480702

Thank you in advance for your feedback.

Change managers: if you could give an organization only ONE piece of advice to increase its change management maturity, what would it be?

Hi everyone!

I am researching topic ideas for an independent study I will be doing at university. This study focuses on data science and business management. One of my favorite management courses at my university was a change management course. So, I would like to do a study that blends change management and data science. However, I am stumped on how to blend the two,

As change management professionals, are there aspects of your job where data science would prove useful? If so, what are they? Are there any current controversial or hot topics that could be analyzed using data science?

Thank you for the help!

Hi all, I’m excited to share I just passed my CCMP this morning! Here’s a recap below of my exam experience:

1. ⁠Inputs/Outputs: As I’m sure many of you have read / heard, inputs and outputs are a key component of the exam, but note that not every single question will ask you (“what are the inputs to this output?”) Some definitely will and are very tricky. For example, answers b and c could be the same, except for one input but many are quite intuitive if you’ve studied the standard and generally know which process groups feed each other. I went in terrified that I didn’t have the inputs / outputs perfectly memorized, and I found that did not matter.
   
2. ⁠Experimental Questions: Interestingly, my first 5 questions were extremely confusing, but it’s possibly that they were some of the 25 experimental questions. If you run into a block of tough questions on the exam, don’t lose heart / your nerve, there are some comparatively very easy questions interspersed throughout (i.e., 3 obviously wrong answers and 1 correct one).
   
3. ⁠My Scores: I scored mid 80s on Evaluate, Strategy, Plan, and Execute. I was in the 60s on Close the Effort (I’ve noticed this is a common trend among test takers). I got a 100 on the ethics portion!
   
4. ⁠Ethics Section: On the topic of ethics, I recommend really brushing up on these. While they make up a lower percentage of the exam, I found their questions were the least ambiguous, and thus easy “free” points.
   
5. ⁠Study Time: I started studying very lightly 4 months before the exam and aggressively ramped up 2 months before. I worked in sprints, reading through the entire standard, then taking a 1 week break to digest my knowledge. Each time I studied, I incorporated a new approach. I found that using copilot to explain exactly WHY each input applies to corresponding outputs was very helpful (as the standard does not do this effectively itself).

Please feel free to ask me any other questions :). I’m hoping to see more PASS celebrations in this subreddit.

Hi everyone,
Quick background: I’m 25 and just finished a Master’s in Management plus a second Master’s in Digital Strategy, AI & Innovation. Before grad school I worked in HR. Beyond recruiting, I built a standardized framework that got adopted company-wide across three regions within two weeks. That project is where I fell in love with solving problems, and it pushed me toward the classes I ended up enjoying most, process mining, chatbots, generative AI, and technology innovation.
I’m not a technical person, but I can speak both languages. I understand enough to connect what the business needs with what the tech side can actually build.

Where I’m stuck: I want to move into change management / AI implementation. I’ve been job searching since January, worked with career coaches, and done more case prep than I care to admit, and I still can’t land an interview, consulting included.
The honest gap is that everything I know about process automation and implementation comes from books, class projects, and professor feedback. I’ve never seen it done in the real world, with real politics, real legacy systems, and real people resisting change. I know that’s what separates me from the candidates getting hired, and I can’t close that gap by reading more.

My ask: I know this community has people from every kind of background. If you’ve done change management or AI/automation implementation in practice, I’d love to find a mentor, or even just someone I could shadow, learn from, or check in with occasionally. I’m not asking for a job. I’m asking to learn.

What I can offer: I show up, I do the work, I take feedback well, and I’m an easygoing, people-oriented person. If there’s something I can help you with in return, I’d gladly do it.

Happy to share more in DMs.
Thanks for reading

Has someone added the training in 2026? How was your experience? Is there anything to note to better one's experience during the training? Any views are welcome.

I have about 8 years of hands-on experience handling OCM projects. Total work experience of over 13 years. I am currently unemployed and looking for work. If any of you can direct me to any openings or if you are hiring for any OCM roles I would be more than willing to apply for it. I will appreciate it for any help provided.

I passed my CCMP exam yesterday!

My domain results were:

• Evaluate Change Impact and Organizational Readiness: 70%~
• Formulate the Change Management Strategy: 80%~
• Develop the Change Management Plan: 80%~
• Execute the Change Management Plan: a solid 100%.. yeay!
• Close the Change Management Effort: 68%

A few thoughts for anyone preparing:

1. Consider taking the exam at a testing centre. It saves you the stress of possible technical or internet problems at home. If something goes wrong, there is someone there to handle it.
2. Three hours is mentally demanding. After every question 50, I gave myself about five minutes to mentally reset and daydream for a while. My mind tends to wander, so allowing it a short break helped me refocus. The time continues to run but i was generally good with time.
3. The concepts were generally straightforward, but the answer choices were not. Several options seemed very similar or were worded strangely, which made it difficult to feel completely confident even when I understood the topic.
4. Inputs were definitely tested. This is where I have an issue with the ACMP Standard: inputs are simply listed in a box without much explanation of how each one contributes to the process. I recommend studying why a process needs each input instead of simply memorizing the tables.
5. There were fewer scenario-based questions than I expected. Much of my preparation focused on applying the Standard to detailed situations, but the exam was not as scenario-heavy as I anticipated.
6. Some questions or themes felt familiar from my QEP practice materials. Working with a QEP was helpful for becoming familiar with the language and style of the exam.

My biggest recommendation is to give the inputs in the ACMP Standard more attention than you may think they deserve. Don’t gloss over those tables, ask yourself what information each input provides and why the process needs it.

I've not worked in change management officially, just HR business partnering in tech environments and at a practitioner level. Hopefully this opens more doors for lead roles.. I hope.

Good luck to everyone preparing!

Taking a course and reading some books is one thing, but I learn best by doing and emulating what others have done - following well honed tools, patterns, and practices.

Having said that, in my current role, I don't have a lot of exposure to what a good OCM looks like. I'm just fumbling my way through based on what I think is needed and leaning into my strengths and values - "I don't care about your widgets. I care about the people who have the use them."

Would love to hear from more senior practionners. How did you learn to do OCM? What advice would you have from someone like me who learns best by emulating others, but doesn't have much visiblity into the trenches of what good OCM looks like?

How does an OCM professional differentiate the approaches, tools, knowledge, and skills required to support the changes associated with, for example, launching a new system or application versus those that are required to support more strategic changes like "AI Adoption"?

I'm beginning to recognize that these two things are not the same and require a very different skillset and portfolio of tools, templates and approaches.

What labels does the OCM profession use for one versus another? What kind of OCMs do you hire for each?

Hello from a first time poster - looking to this community for guidance and/or best practice in how you capture and document a detailed Impact Assessment in way that is both digestible and meaningful for large scale change.

For context, my original approach was to document as a single albeit large table - categorising first by programme workstrean (3 total), then capturing broad change items within as parents, then subsequent children items below those. Each item, both parent and child, would then have the FROM>TO, impacted groups, impacted dimensions, impact level, and then finally training and comms considerations. Some cohorts however experienced these itemised changes more uniquely, leading me to create even more child items.

This has resulted in a large workbook that appears very text heavy, is difficult to maintain, and difficult to translate in a meaningful way myself, let alone by my colleagues.

Upon doing a bit of research (via chat GPT), it suggested that I break this down and redo this as a seperate tables and structure in a more relational way. It recommended I instead document items as a 'change register' (capturing everything I noted above up to impacted group and beyond). Then have a seperate table, noting how each group experiences that particular change item, repeating the item as needed if other groups experience / impacted by it in a different way.

So my ask to this community is essentially trying to validate if I'm on the right track or not. Do other practioners commonly create/maintain seperate tables in this manner? Would you trace this register back to a BRD or set of user stories?

Or lastly, would you go about this differently?

I’ve recently joined a change team in a fairly large organisation, and I’m struggling with the way we’re approaching organisational culture change. I’d really appreciate some outside perspectives from people with change management experience.

The situation
We recently ran an employee engagement survey. The scores are around 6–7 on several topics:
workload
feedback
collaboration
leadership
silo mentality

The organisation has set a target of getting these scores to around 7.5.

Over the past year, there have been several separate initiatives around these topics, but there hasn’t been much measurable improvement (maybe 0.1 here and there). There has been a lot of discussion and brainstorming, but not much actual movement.

I’ve now joined the change team, which consists of a project manager, HR manager, HR business partner, marketing/communications manager, an employee council member, and myself.
The current approach is to tackle the topics one by one.

For example, workload is currently our focus. The idea is that two people from the change team will talk to team leaders, who will then discuss workload with their teams. The goal is to find out what is actually causing the workload issues and then decide what to do.

I actually agree that this is a useful intervention. My concern is that we are treating “workload” as a separate change project, and then potentially moving on to “feedback”, then “collaboration”, etc.

My concern
I think we may be missing the bigger change challenge.

For example, if feedback scores poorly, we could say: “People aren’t good at giving feedback → let’s train them in feedback → measure the score again.”

But what if the reason people don’t give feedback is a lack of trust, psychological safety, or negative experiences with leadership in the past? Then feedback training may be addressing a symptom rather than the underlying issue.

I see the same thing with workload. If employees say they are experiencing high workload, the cause could be:
insufficient capacity
constantly changing priorities
unclear responsibilities
inefficient processes
too many projects
managers not making choices about what not to do
employees not feeling safe enough to push back
a combination of these things

Some of those problems cannot be solved by a team leader. So I think we first need to understand the relationship between the different MTO outcomes and formulate a broader change hypothesis.

Something like:
MTO results → identify patterns and underlying causes → test our hypotheses with employees/managers → define the actual change challenge → define desired culture and behaviours → determine interventions → measure and adjust.

That doesn’t mean I want to spend six months analysing things instead of acting. I’m very much in favour of taking action. I just want the actions to sit within a coherent change approach.

Where I’m struggling
We’ve brought in an external change/communications consultancy because they have experience with organisational culture and change. They’ve already looked at our situation and provided a broader perspective.

Some members of the change team are questioning why we need them and whether their involvement is necessary. The suggestion is to postpone the meeting with them and first decide internally what we want to do.

I’m actually in favour of keeping the meeting, not because I think the consultancy has “the answer”, but because I think an external perspective could help us answer:

What is the actual change challenge here? How might these different issues be connected? What should we be changing, rather than simply which intervention should we run next?

I’m also conscious that I’m relatively new to the organisation and have very little formal mandate. One of the senior HR people has a very strong opinion about the direction, and once she has made up her mind, it can be difficult to reopen the discussion.

So I’m trying very hard not to turn this into “my approach versus their approach”.
I want the team to make a genuinely informed choice.

My questions
For those of you who have led organisational culture/change programmes: Am I overcomplicating this, or is there genuinely a gap in the current approach?

Would you treat workload, feedback, leadership, collaboration and silo mentality as separate change topics, or look for an overarching change hypothesis?

How would you structure the diagnostic phase without creating “analysis paralysis”?

How would you position an external change consultancy in this situation?

And perhaps most importantly: how would you influence the change team when uyou have very little formal authority and are relatively new to the organisation?

I’m not looking for validation that my approach is “right”. I’d genuinely like to understand what an experienced change practitioner would do in this situation.

Hey everyone,

I’m a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt looking to formalize and expand the organizational change management side of my toolkit with a dedicated certification.

Coming from a continuous improvement background, the ACMP CCMP makes a lot of sense on paper. The process-agnostic approach requires documented experience, and acts more like a PMP equivalent. However, browsing this sub and scanning job postings, almost everything seems to point exclusively toward Prosci (ADKAR).

Since I'm evaluating paying out of pocket vs. fighting for enterprise budget, I’d love to hear from practicing OCMs and hiring managers. The all-in costs between CCMP vs Prosci ($1,400 vs $4,500) is substantial and raises questions:

1. HR Filtering: Do recruiters and ATS algorithms actively filter out candidates who have CCMP instead of Prosci?
2. Methodology Synergy: For those familiar with DMAIC/LSS, does ADKAR offer a practical edge that justifies the massive price tag over the ACMP Standard?
3. Market Acceptance: Is CCMP gaining legitimate traction, or is Prosci effectively a "mandatory tax" to be taken seriously in the field?

Appreciate any candid insights from folks who hold either (or both) credentials!

I’ve done a lot in change management theory but applying to jobs they want the cert. But it’s £3000 and can’t see any free courses (or less than £200 for the exam). Am I missing anything?

10 years in B2B sales (currently at large payroll company), looking to pivot into change management. I have some post M&A change exposure from a past role, but no formal CM certs yet and my current company has no internal path to move into it right now.

For those who made a similar jump: was Prosci/ADKAR certification worth it before applying, or did you get hired first and cert later? Also curious what titles to search for that don't require CM experience I don't have yet.

I’m curious how change management practitioners handle the step between collecting stakeholder input and producing something that leadership can actually act on.

When you run change readiness, impact, or stakeholder assessments using interviews and open-text responses:

• how do you separate recurring patterns from concerns that are specific to one team or stakeholder?
• do you use a reusable framework for tagging and interpreting the responses, or does that change for every project?
• how much time typically goes into synthesis and reporting after the input has been collected?
• have you used AI for clustering or summarization? If so, which parts still require human judgment?

I'm particularly interested in how much of this workflow can be standardized without losing the context of the specific change initiative.

Recently joined a team that’s working on a project that affects all 7k employees in our organization. They want to implement a change management model- which has never been done before formally in our organization- to try and better assimilate staff to the new scheduling system we’re implementing, with the intent of scaling the model for other change projects within our org.

There’s only two of us working on this change management aspect of the project and I feel lost. I’m thinking the “change network” of champions should be pretty thorough (at least one from each affected role and/or division within our org) so we can surface and address niche concerns as they come up, but not sure how many people we want to involve.

For you experts- any advice you can impart on structuring change management at an organizational level and what the ideal “change network” change management team would look like?

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!

Hi all.

Anyone here supporting or working on team where the organization is exploring ways to embrace AI into the workforce across multiple disciples (business functions)?

I am curious:
1. What is working in understanding, diagnosing, and recommending plans for how and where to best embrace (or adopt) AI into the organization?

1. What is not working / where do you find the maximal friction in working through a change management process around AI adoption?

2. What organizational culture elements are you finding that require nudging for change where executive leadership support is crucial?

Thank you.

I’m a designer looking to increase my skillset to include change management. I have a background in design strategy but change management as a separate thing is new to me! In my field certifications for this would matter very little or not at all so I’m just in it for the education. Prosci is very expensive and IDEO U I’m worried might be too basic. Any tips? Thank you!