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A Project Manager's Take on Career Planning
Bob Weinstein is a journalist who covers technology, project management, the workplace and career development.
There are two traditional ways to approach career planning. You can take a long-term view and lay out a succession of hypothetical jobs leading to a jackpot, the career of your dreams. Or you can adopt a short-term attack plan that starts with a goal followed by the job or jobs necessary to attain it.
The long- and short-term views are neat, clean and easy to understand. They're nice and comfortable templates for career planning. The tough part is making them work.
I have a better strategy, which I've dubbed "the project manager's guide to career planning." It's sort of a short-term approach, factoring in the future--which is more than a year from now--but not obsessing over it. In short, think about tomorrow, but concentrate on today. Or consider your career the same way a PM embraces a project.
There are countless principles that PMs live by. They were created to help PMs successfully manage projects. They're all based upon real-world experiences. Some are obvious, redundant and even simplistic, yet most of them are on the money. And it's the obvious tenets that are often considered last because they're so obvious. A favorite of mine is to make no assumptions about a project.
A PM--regardless of his or her specialty--who makes assumptions about a project, either at the beginning, middle or end, ought to be drummed out of the field. No matter how much …
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