Deanna Corbett ⋅ Winter Garden, FL VMware ⋅ 21 years experience

Hi Arthur,

Please do read the replies mentioned in the link from the ACP staffer; and I'll offer a little more info here than what I included on that thread to make it more specific to your question:

The most junior project management roles often start as "Project Support" or "Project Assistant" and are ones where you are often doing very detailed work on certain areas of a project such as taking meeting notes, organizing the project documentation in the doc repository, making updates to the project schedule, and compiling the status reports.

Once you start managing your own projects, they will likely be smaller, and you may have a few smaller projects to manage at the same time. You will put into practice core PM skills like understanding the project objectives and intended out, breaking down the work to be done, identifying the people or teams who must perform the work, working with them to create the schedule, execute to the plan, and track the results.

Once you have successfully managed smaller projects, it's likely you will be given larger responsibilities, including budget management (which doesn't always fall to you on smaller projects), project governance, etc.

Eventually you can work your way up to managing programs - which is a collection of related projects that are interdependent and aim to achieve some larger goal.

Because the skills of a PM can be applied in a wide variety of contexts (IT, Operations, Strategy & Planning, HR, Finance, Manufacturing, etc.) it will not only give you the chance to work on different things on a regular basis, and allow you movement within a company if you find a larger one you enjoy working for - but it also gives you a level of job security because of the broad application.

Additional bonus is that if you find that you don't enjoy working in one part of the business - say Finance projects that involve lots of data - then you can shift to work in a different organization where you do like it (Operations where they work on continuous process improvements).

You can definitely have a long career being a project manager / program manager. If you are just starting out, I do recommend getting your PMP certification.

If you'd like to connect outside this thread, feel free to DM me.

Kindly,
Deanna

ACP AdvisorNet Staff ⋅ New York, NY ⋅ 10 years experience

Hi Arthur,

Thank you for your question, and thank you for your service!

Someone recently posted a question similar to yours that received some great responses:

https://acp-advisornet.org/questions/4685

Feel free to Direct Message any of the Advisors on the thread to learn more about the field of Project Management and its career path progression! Hopefully this helps!