On-boarding new PMs without experience

I can speak from the perspective of the newbie I was about seven years ago. I joined the PM team from within the company. The director brought me in as a project management specialist and groomed me for the PM manager position, which I was promoted into about two years later.

During that two-year period, I took the initiative to take basic project management classes online through ed2go (inexpensive), which helped me understand terminology, tools and basic fundamentals of the practice, and led to a CAPM. In the meantime, my director had me do the back shop work for the team such as process mapping, user guides and updating templates. Then she assigned me to manage interns for an internal project, setting up checkpoints for me to present her with milestone deliverables to monitor my progress.

If I were on-boarding someone new today, I would follow the same path: Hire someone self-motivated to learn, encourage this person to research and utilize external sources of learning, delegate tasks that support experienced PMs and assign an internal project with close monitoring. It worked for me!