Recently, I received many requests seeking me to share with them how do novices or those who are mid-life career changed get into Project Management industry?

Well, to manage professional or Corporate projects well, you have to start manage personal projects, such as for those profit or non-profit organizations.

Firstly, you need to understand the concept of project management. Get the main gist of project management, and then start to manage projects.

Next, you have to network with other project managers in your desired industry so that the knowledge can be shared or you can be tagged onto others experience.

If you are working into a paper qualification conscious working environment, you need to get yourself a certificate in Project Management. Be it from Project Management Institute, Prince2 or Certificate in IT Project Management (CITPM), it is crucial to get yourself certified. For some organizations, with relevant project management certificate and experience, you are then qualified to knock on their employment door.

Some of these organizations feel that you need to have the fundamental Project Management knowledge, instead of them to invest time to train a fresh school-leaver. Thus you can start to gain hands-on experience by managing some personal projects such as picnic, outings, house renovation, friend’s wedding and so forth. All this will gives you a

There is no doubt of the intense knowledge of terminology, concept used in the formal education. However, not many organizations are following the same terminology either. However, the process is flexible and needs to adjust to every organization. For example, some organizations that I knew, they don’t use the project charter. They will use the project request to represent charter.

In my opinion, terminology variation is alright so long everyone in the Project Management Office is aware of what the document is referring to.

Lesson Learned:

#1- Understand the basic PM concepts

#2- Use the PM knowledge and start to manage many non-profit projects (such as picnic, outing, classmate gathering and so forth)

#3- To gain the precious knowledge, like project costing, project scheduling, project scoping etc

#4- the most important factor – Once you are managing some Corporate projects, start to create a project checklist template. I have created the template and it eases my project management effort.

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