Being a Project Manager Part-I

Why Do You Want to Be a Project Manager?

Before you think about taking up project manager as a career progression option, you should also know why you would like to be a project manager. Your reasons to be a project manager can be one of the following

• To have better job security
• Get higher salary and be paid more
• Make career progression faster
• Like challenging job that exert control over resources, cost and deliver value to customers, stakeholders
• Gain more visibility in front of executive management by presenting executive reports, dashboard

You can also read some of these interesting stories by real world project managers shared at PMI forum – why did they become project managers.

How to become a project manager?

Once you decide your career choice is to become a project manager, you should know how you can become one. Given your current work profile, you should check what options and alternatives do you have? Broadly speaking there are two approaches to get into project management profession

Utilizing domain expertise

If one look at project managers in many enterprises, you will realize that they are experienced and have taken up project management role by virtue of their expertise in respective domain. And this has been a common phenomenon for years. Organizations wanted to utilize experience of their engineers, engineering managers (or likewise) couple with expertise and knowledge to meet organization’s objective in terms of project delivery.

So this approach of getting into project management career involves earning academic degree, university degree, and then years of experience in a given domain, proven track record in managing stipulated work. And then as these people move up in ladder, they have been given responsibility to manage & deliver projects.

Sometimes your organization can provide you project management training or you can subscribe for project management training on your own like these courses, seminar around project management training are provided by American Management Institute

Formal Project Management Education

The skillset, capabilities required to manage project are pretty broad. Many academic institutions have realized the popularity of project management professionals, especially project managers. Hence institutes like Post, Excite, Chartered Institute of Project Management and many such project management certification options available to you. Nowadays we can see young faces for project leadership positions. There are graduation and post-graduation degrees offered by institutes. Graduates, post-graduates once get these degree can take up project management positions like project analyst, project leader, project planner, project manager, etc depending on the hiring organization and student’s past experience.

In next segment we will see how you can improve your chances of getting into project management profession and what it takes to be a project manager.

Post by Dhan Wagholikar

About Zilicus

Zilicus offers the best project portfolio management tool ZilicusPM, with robust project management tools capabilities and easy ways to track project management KPI,

Know more about project portfolio management, Gantt chart, best project management tool, project management office, project management tips, project planning guide, project risk management, project scope management, effective project management, project manager guides and know more about Project Portfolio Management Software, Project Management Software Guide.