How to Become a Project Manager

Nobody starts their career as a project manager, so how do you get your first job as one?

A question I commonly get asked both at work and in my personal life is ‘how do I become a project manager?’

There are many possible answers to this question, but for many people the answer is that you’re probably already doing it, you just don’t realise it. Most of the people I have known in my professional life didn’t start out as Project Managers, but either fell into it or manoeuvred themselves into a project management role.

What I’d like to share are some thoughts on how to do this yourself, because despite the rise of Scrum Masters and Product Managers, the world needs more Project Managers that can take the bare bones of an idea and make it a reality.

I believe that there are five steps you need to climb before you can justifiably start applying for Project Management roles, which are summarised below.

When people ask me about Project Management, I often start by asking what they do now. Quite often, what they describe to me sounds pretty much like a project.

Put simply, a project has a start, a middle and an end. It involves dealing with unknown things ( risks) and problems to solve ( activities) and, crucially, it ends with your organisation having something that it didn’t have before ( a deliverable).

When we apply this definition to the kind of work that you might be doing, all sorts of project work emerges:

Once you start to look for them, projects are everywhere. They might not be treated as projects and they might actually go better if they were, but nevertheless if you’re doing these types of things you’re probably doing a project. If this sounds like…

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