Do you want to start a PM career? Are you confused about all the buzzwords and do not know where to start? If yes, you are on the right page. Here is a small guide on how to start a Project Manager career in an IT company.
1. Be patient. Either you are making a career shift or you are at the start of your career, it will unquestionably take some time to get into the industry. You need to go through a long path to get the right combination of theoretical knowledge, practical experience, and soft skills.
2. Do the homework. You are going to spend at least 8 hours of your day at work, so be sure you are jumping into something that really interests you. Try to come across and communicate with people from the industry, so you can get more insights about the job and get a better understanding of “How does a project manager’s day look like”. It is crucial to have the right expectations.
3. Self-education is the key to success. Set up a learning plan and stick to it. Obviously, at first, it will be challenging to connect all the dots and find the right information from tons of sources available on the web, but for this stage, that’s fine. If you are messed it means you are on the right track. I will be writing about this stage with more details in my upcoming blogs, but for now, just try to get a general understanding of Agile and its frameworks. You can read the Agile Manifesto and the 12 values of Agile https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html. For the Scrum, just go through the Scrum Guidebook (https://scrumguides.org/download.html)
4. What’s next? Try to use and implement some of the things you have already learned. It is very common to shift from a QA, Developer, IT Support Specialist, etc., to a PM job in IT companies. So, if you are in IT, the environment is already set up; hence you can learn and implement lots of things in collaboration with the Project Managers.
5. What if you are just starting a career or doing a tremendous shift from a different field? Even if IT Project Management has its specifics, there are lots of intercourses with other jobs. So you can try implementing some of the things which a PM generally does in your company. For example, you can set up a task management system within your team by using Trello, Jira, or other task management tools. You can integrate some of the Scrum Events (you will get this as soon as you read the guideline), such as stand-ups, retrospectives, etc., to increase team productivity.
6. Meanwhile, I would definitely recommend taking a formal course. This will strengthen your knowledge and give a deeper understanding of the processes. And finally, you will get an opportunity to network, which will definitely help you in the future.
7. Finally, if you are not going to shift to a Project Manager role in your current company, start working on your CV. Ensure that you have read the job description in detail and meet the company’s requirements. Here is an article by my colleague that will surely help you and make the job search process more effective: https://codics.medium.com/how-to-apply-for-a-job-at-codics-f7d29ff8e10c.
For a start, you may apply for positions such are” Project Manager Assistant”, “Junior Project Manager” etc. Internships may be another good starting point as well.
Good luck and may the force be with you!
