Can You Tell Your Career Story?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development  

Some of the questions that I am asked by people who are currently pursuing (or wish to pursue) a career in project management surprise me. They obviously reflect genuine concerns or worries, and in many cases I am sure that they are the result of interactions that they have had, or comments that they have been given. But it seems to me that too often, these people are worried about trivial things.

For example, I was recently asked if having had four jobs in nine years was too many. Someone else was concerned that they would be viewed as someone who couldn’t stick at something if they changed employers more than once in a five-year span. And a third worried that they had had too many different job titles in the first few years of their career and would be perceived as someone who didn’t know what they wanted to do. As an experienced hirer of PMs, these just aren’t factors to me, but clearly the perception is that they matter.

We all know that these days, applications are screened by software before ever being seen by a human, but these aren’t obvious scenarios where software would reject an application. Every individual is different, and I can’t say for sure what the reaction would be of any one hiring manager or HR rep when looking at one of these profiles.

What I can say is what I consider, and I think it’s reasonably aligned with …

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