On today’s Project Management Guide, I’m looking at what to do if you are looking at changing careers into project management. Project management can be an exciting and challenging career, and it gives you the opportunity to work with a wide variety of different people, companies, technologies and industries over the course of your career. I find the variety and surprises of project management incredibly rewarding, and can’t imagine doing anything else!

So if you’d like to become a project manager, how do you go about it? The first thing you should do is take a look at my post on What is Project Management? This is just to make sure you know what you are letting yourself in for!

Secondly, you need to get involved with a project – but not as a project manager, not just yet. The idea of this is to enable you to observe the process of a project in action. Try to notice the ways the different elements of the project, and the different people involved in it, fit together to make the whole (hopefully) successful.

Thirdly, observe a project manager in action. Take a look at the kind of things he or she has to do throughout the project – it certainly isn’t just sitting creating ever more complex gantt charts! You need a number of different skills to be a project manager – and many of these are ‘soft skills’. I’ll be looking at these next Monday.

Finally, you need to jump into project management! Training is always useful, but the best training is through being mentored by a project manager. I started off in project management by working as project support. This enabled me to learn the various process and procedures within project management, and also to learn from the project manager up close and personal.

From this point on, you are in project management, and your learning has only just begun. You will need to keep learning every day, through training courses, through books, through reading Project Management Guide (of course!), but most importantly, through experience.

Project management is exciting, fun, and rewarding. Welcome to the team!

What about you? How did you get into project management? How are you planning to get into project management? Any other tips to share? Post below!