Career Pivot Operations Manager to Project Manager

Your prior experience should be a pretty good fit for a PM role. As an operations director, I would assume you have significant leadership and people skills including both reporting employees, and customers.

For technical skills, you are probably already responsible for staffing plans, budget, inventory, scheduling service appointments, adjusting plans when you find unexpected problems, etc. It may be different from some PM jobs that involve months or years of planning rather than days or weeks, but other positions will involve shorter activities and continuous improvement. If you look at PMI’s Disciplined Agile lifecycle types, operations and continuous delivery are included.

For strategic skills, you should consider how you can demonstrate enough industry knowledge to make value-based decision. General business concepts still apply, but change in different contexts.

As for salary, 6 figures is a broad range but typical salaries in the PNW are in the 100-200k range. Higher salaries might have very demanding schedules. A colleague left Amazon due to a mandatory 65 hour minimum workweek. Other jobs might be more technically focused and unless you have the domain knowledge you won’t command the top of the pay range. There is also often a trade between job stability, and compensation with higher pay to a less certain future.

Brandon,

you are right assuming that experience is more important than mere knowledge. CAPM is a good start, and you probably look for the PMP once you think you have the necessary experience to apply. It could very well be that the minor projects led by you and other activities as a service director qualify for being seen as project activities and sum up for the PMP requirements. It is mostly a matter of perspective.

Any leadership experience and that with customers will help as a project manager. PMI has a salary report published in which you can find reasonable ranges for your expectations.

Standing out as applicant is in my view that you have people in your network who can recommend you and you can use as references. So review and intensify your business network in this way. CAPM or even PMP are not sufficient to standout, no certifications are, only trust in your capability to perform. So have your war stories ready.

Project management is in its core make it happen.
And it is people business first.

Thomas

In my opinion, this should be an easy transition from Operations Manager role to PM role as many of the tasks and activities are interrelated.

In general, your soft skills are transferable regardless of the industry but the technical skills is where it might be challenging, however, again, in your case I think it shouldn’t be an issue and quite frankly I highly recommend you look at getting your PMP directly instead of CAPM because I truly believe in your capacity as Operations Manager you did carry lots of project management activities. To quality for the PMP, you need 3 years of experience doing project management activities, regardless of your title.

Hope this helps.

Hi Rami, thank you very much. I am glad you mentioned doing the PMP instead. I believe I may have the experience and projects to go for it. I will look into that.