AbstractSoftware process improvement (SPI) can be seen as a profession, having its own competence needs and its own community of interest. European projects EQN and EU Cert have defined skills sets and a common certification scheme for about 20 professions, mainly in IT domain. A common way to describe IT domain from process perspective is concept ‘3S’ (software, systems, services). Software process can be seen as the first spearhead among these. First software process models, such as Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and SPICE, have existed already about 20 years. That is also the main reason to start process improvement profession from software processes, because we have much experience in that. Software Process Improvement Manager (SPI Manager) is one of new topics in EU Cert project. Development of SPI Manager training and certification scheme has been done in many small steps so far. This paper explains the current structure and main components of SPI Manager competences, training needs and certification scheme. Several other schemes will be developed in future for PI‐related competences. Current version of SPI Manager skills set is based mainly on software, systems and service processes and their related reference models. It could be used in future also in other domains than IT. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.