Throughline

Business and finance

Project Management Specialist in San Francisco

230 postings read · sampled 2026-10-01 · source ats · 50 employers · largest 19% of it

What employers actually ask for

Credentials named in the 230 postings we read, ranked by how many mentioned each one.

What it costs

Exam and application fees plus typical self-study hours. Almost nobody needs every credential on this list — start with the top line.

Most-asked-for, on its own
$555PMP · ~200 hrs
asked for in 25 of 230 postings — 11%
If you earned all 1 of them
$555
fees checked 2026-08
200 hrs
200 hours — about 20 weeks at 10 hrs/wk

Lower signal for this role

Credentials that barely appeared in this sample. That is not a claim they are worthless — plenty are valuable for a different job, a different city, or a promotion later. It is a claim that employers here mostly did not ask.

What the official taxonomy says

O*NET surveys people already doing this job. That describes who got hired over a long window, not what employers are asking for now — where it disagrees with the counts above, the counts are the more current answer.

Education reported by people doing this job
64%reported bachelor’s degree
  • Bachelor’s degree64%
  • Associate’s degree or other 2-year degree12%
  • High school diploma or equivalent6%

Job Zone Four: Considerable Preparation Needed. Most of these occupations require a four-year bachelor's degree, but some do not.

O*NET 13-1082.00 · pulled 2026-10-01 · percentages are of surveyed workers, each rounded separately, so they need not total 100

What it pays

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. A different survey from the postings above, so the two do not share a sample.

$79,990
10th percentile
$135,040
median
$206,240
90th percentile

Every credential above costs $555 — about 1 day's pay at the median.

Who was hiring

Employers with at least one matching posting in this sample.

OpenAI · Zoox · Anthropic · Rocket Lab · Intuitive Surgical · Deegit Inc · Figma · Harvey · Lucid Motors · System Canada Technologies · Verkada · 360 IT Professionals · Chandos · Databricks · Oura · Scale AI · Astranis · Baseten · Collabera · Discord · Harbinger Motors · Mercor · Notion · Redwood Materials · Stripe · Agility Robotics · Asana · Cursor · Datadog · Lyft · Antora Energy · Applied Intuition · Artech Information System · Ask IT Consulting · DN Tanks (DN LLC) · Formic · Gusto · Hinge Health · Infojini Inc · Klaviyo · Kodiak Robotics · Perplexity · Physical Intelligence · Reddit · Robinhood · Roblox · Saronic · Sierra · SpaceX · Zip

The same role elsewhere

Next

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