Hi,
I am changing careers from a 10 year Program Manager/ Director to now taking the Project Management Basic course to eventually sit for the CAPM Exam. I am also looking to change industries from non-profit social service sector to IT Project Management. Are there any suggestions, tips or good recruiters that can ease this transition to at least get my foot in the door to gain experience. Saving Changes...
Switching domains is definitely possible, but you need to be realistic about where your skills will fit in when starting out.
PM skills apply broadly across industries, and not all the problems requiring a PM are specific to the underlying technology. I would suggest mapping your skills to the types of projects that are common in many domains including IT, but are not strictly IT functions.
I've managed the development of organizational training to enable software deployment which was more focused on how to develop course material. Organizational changes and office infrastructure enhancements occur in any industry. Quality management may be more about understanding the value chain of the technology rather than detailed knowledge in one aspect.
While you're not going to walk in the door and be able to second-guess the technical principals, as you work through projects that are more universal in their domain applicability, you will pick up on a lot of the necessary technical aspects that drive the project planning, if you listen and take the time to learn. Saving Changes...
Megan JohnstonLead Consultant| Analyte Projects Ltd. Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
I would be very surprised if your Program experience would require you to go all the way back to CAPM. A lot of Program skills are transferrable to Project Management and vice versa. As someone who has switched industries from public sector healthcare work to private sector IT work I would recommend instead of focusing on CAPM that your learning focus should shift toward learning and understanding software development at a high-level (Software Development Lifecycle) and also something with an agile methodology focus. For a good grounding in agile principles with an otherwise wealthy project toolkit I recommend scrum master training. In particular I recommend the Professional Scrum Master designation for a good holistic overview of how agile software development works. Saving Changes...
Megan makes a great point. It's not going to hurt anything if you start the PMP application. Worst case, you identify specific areas where you're need to improve your qualifications. But, you might also be surprised by what you find out. Since you can't submit the application until you've met specific requirements, there's no charge to use the application to figure this out. Saving Changes...
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