The project management field is a popular exploration ground for many transitioning military service members, and for good reason. Project management rewards critical thinking, rapid decision making, and team leadership skills generally built and honed through military service. Most officers and senior NCOs transitioning out of the military have the experience, soft skills, and hard skills aligned to the academic definition of a project manager. That’s what excites many transitioning military members exploring the career choice.

If you think project management is your next career calling, this primer is for you. This article is here to help you understand the different roles project managers play within different organizations, how to understand different project management roles available to you based on your background and experience, and highlight the right experience in your resume to help present yourself as a viable candidate for those roles.

Internal versus customer-facing project management

Initiate, plan, execute, control, close. All project principles are the same, right? Not so fast. Some project management roles focus on internal company activities while others focus on delivering projects to the company’s customers. While each of these roles use the same project management competencies to plan and deliver a project, the skills hiring managers are looking for are vastly different.

Customer project managers have a direct impact on company revenue and future business. They are typically planning and delivering against a set of contract requirements and terms defined by a customer. Internal project managers have a direct impact on a company’s cost structure or efficiency. They are typically planning and delivering against a set of requirements defined by a department head or company executive. Both roads provide lots of career growth and expansion opportunities but both types of roles present challenges you must overcome as a transitioning service member.

By carefully crafting your career message (not just your resume but your elevator pitch, Linkedin profile, and professional network) around your desired role, you may find more interest from recruiters and hiring managers.

For customer project management roles, focus your message around the size and scope of your project experience in the military. While you won’t have experience managing revenue, focus on the cost and budget management aspects of your projects. Show how you consistently met key milestones, on time. This will show your ability to hit key targets that are typically billing and revenue triggers. Highlight any work with civilian contract companies and your role in their coordination or integration into your projects. Finally, even though you didn’t serve customers in the military, the US military is one of the largest customers in the world and employers value inside knowledge of their customers. Target companies that call on defense industries, and more explicitly, provided goods and services to your command, base, or post. When targeting companies looking for project management roles, individual certifications and clearances are sometimes a discriminator for customer project management roles due to customer contract requirements. If you read a job description with a required certification and you have it, hit the apply button even if you don’t have the requisite project management skills. Many times, a company is willing take a less experienced person and train them if they can meet the contractually stipulated certifications and clearances for a project management role. Just remember the learning curve can be steep.

Internal project management roles require a bit of a different message. Showing an advanced knowledge of best practices is key in these roles. That means your message should focus on your deep knowledge of processes, policies, tools, and techniques of the targeted department or organization. Don’t use the generic ‘project management is transferable’ approach. If your background is in IT management (Signal Corps, Communications, etc.) focus on IT project management roles. If you are a Human Resources specialist, stay in that functional area for your project management search. Project managers are all over large companies today running myriad of process improvement and implementation projects. Typically, if a company is searching for an internally focused project manager with an external hire requisition, they are looking to bring in fresh thinking. Scour the job description to see how they want to operate and tailor your message to show you know how to get them to their goal.

Project/Program Management Office or PMO roles

Throughout the last decade, many companies have built project management offices or PMOs. These offices typically build and manage the tools, techniques, and procedures used across the company to support project managers and collect metrics across the project spectrum. PMO roles generally are not suited to a transitioning service member. PMO roles typically target experienced project managers with a desire to get out of the trenches and into a corporate operations role or employees with significant technical metrics management experience.

Applying for these types of roles as a transition from military service are typically a waste of time, but using the content of these job descriptions to help you craft your message to the company is incredibly valuable. Typically, PMO job descriptions include inside information on how the company operates or wants to operate. They generally include the types of software tools or processes the company will use to plan, execute, and control projects. If you find that your dream company uses Oracle Primavera P6 to schedule all of their projects, you now know where to invest your training dollar.

The Project Manager Player/ Coach role

Many firms today look to a project manager to perform multiple project roles. Academically, project management separates the execution of work on the project from the activities associated with managing the project. While there are many debates to the merits of a player/coach approach, it should mean only one thing to you as a transitioning service member; don’t bother applying. Player/ coach project management roles show up in organizations large and small. Typically groups looking for player/ coach roles are looking for an expert in the player role willing to step up into a project leadership role with contributing team members and provide some general project planning and controls functions.

What this means for most transitioning service members is the skills necessary to perform the player function aren’t developed enough to be successful in the role. These types of roles typically crop up in IT and engineering projects, but can show up anywhere.
Don’t confuse these roles with a Technical Project Manager role though. Technical project managers (or TPMs) typically provide project planning and oversight to very technically complex systems. They are usually product or systems deployment experts. If you are bringing a lot of experience from the military around commercial tools and applications or operations processes, tailor your message around your skills managing and supporting those tools or processes. There is no difference in military and civilian experience there. Technical project managers are in high demand. If you know a system or platform really well, scour the job universe for TPM roles around your knowledge base.

Program Management

Some companies use project and program management interchangeably. Others use program manager to define a higher level role managing either multiple projects or other project managers. Still others will use program manager as an entry-level position coordinating one aspect of their operations with a customer. The same rules apply as the customer and internal project manager roles when targeting these jobs.

Exploring growth opportunities into project management

Many transitioning military members focus on the project management field because of its leadership characteristics, relative seniority, pay scale, and portability across companies and industries. Those attributes make project management attractive to other internal and external candidates as well. If your message and networking has not led to recruiter calls or interviews within a couple months, you may be targeting the wrong level of job to get you the right experience to progress in the project management field.

Some companies groom project managers from other roles within the company. Prove yourself in more junior role and project manager is a good next career step. Others seek project managers as entry level management employees and use the role to groom for corporate management roles. Project managers in some focused companies like construction, architecture/engineering, and systems integration are executive level managers with full profit and loss responsibility. Larger companies may even have different corporate career levels for project managers between business units. It is imperative you understand how project managers function within the company and the business unit you are targeting.

If you find yourself not qualifying for the role of project manager in your preferred companies, look at roles that will allow you to grow into a project manager role. Project support roles that focus on project controls (scheduling, accounting, requirements management, reporting, etc.) or field support (quality, safety, field supervision, installation management, operations support, etc.) are great stepping stones to becoming a project manager and many align well with the experience collected during a military career.

Good luck on your career transition. Look forward to seeing you in the project management trenches.