Is Project Management a Career? Should It Be?

Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.

  Career Development  

Depending on your perspective, project management is a calling. It can also be a point of departure. An intermission. An accidental interregnum. A stop on the way to somewhere else. For some, it’s something to be avoided.

But here’s a very interesting thought experiment: Is project management actually a career? And should it be?

In the nearly 25 years I’ve been writing for ProjectManagement.com (and just how did that happen?!), I’ve written a lot about project managers, and how many find their way into the project management role.

For a lot of us (and I firmly place myself in this camp), we are accidental project managers. While we didn’t set out to become project managers, project management found us. I can honestly say that I never had a conscious intention of being a project manager. For the first 10 or so years of my career, I had no actual understanding that project management was a thing or that I might be characterized as a project manager, despite the fact that my entire gig was getting complex, difficult and temporary things done well.

Moreover, for many years once I became a project management consultant, I staunchly came down on the side of never wanting to be a project manager again (please don’t ask me how that played out).

Despite both of those truths, I have genuinely been a project manager my entire career. I&…

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