Starting a Project Management Career From Scratch: How I Did It and How You Can Too!

It's no secret that project management is one of the most in-demand and rewarding careers out there. But what if you don't have any experience in the field? Fear not, my friend, I didn’t either when I first started!?

In this three-part series, I'll share with you how I got started in project management and how my career has evolved over the years. I'll discuss some of the important lessons learnt throughout my journey and hopefully demonstrate that you can start from anywhere and build a beautiful project management career.

Part 1: Starting a Career from Scratch

Career-wise, I was a late bloomer. In my twenties, I had big dreams of becoming a successful musician and artist, so I worked long hard days in low-paying (but flexible!) hospitality jobs. It wasn't until my mid-thirties that I realized the dream of stardom wasn’t going to pay my bills nor was it going to bring me fulfillment. (Guess Mom and Dad were right about this one...boo!)

I was pretty deep in debt and so I needed to start making real money. A friend of mine told me about an open administrative assistant position. The job was a temp-to-hire situation and my first assignment was simply to organize the company's stock room. I loved organizing things, so this I knew I could do. I spent about 2 weeks organizing the stock room and developing trust and rapport with the team. This led to my second assignment which was to help the team migrate from Microsoft to Google.

(Stop! Record scratch!)

At that time, I was pretty rough around the professional and technology edges. I knew nothing about computers or software or migrations. I could compose an email and create a calendar event okay, but I had no idea what it meant to be "in the Cloud" or how to work with anyone on migrating data. So I Googled it. I read as much as I could and tried to understand what it was conceptually and then did my best to understand what needed to be done technically. After about two weeks of devouring as much info as possible, I had a decent understanding of the subject and managed to actually help the team successfully migrate to Google. It felt like a miracle!

From there, I took on the next assignment and the next and the next until eventually I was hired full time and then promoted from administrative assistant to executive assistant. There were a lot of growing pains in between, but here's what I learned from this experience:

• You can start your career anytime. I started to get my stride in my late 30's, but you can start to get your stride in your 20s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. There are no rules on when you can start. You just have to start.
• You can start with knowing nothing. I showed you above how I made the leap from waitress to administrative assistant and then eventually to executive assistant. I knew nothing about being an administrative assistant and, as you can see, I was pretty challenged technology-wise. I used every new assignment as an opportunity to learn something new, to grow, and to provide value. As long as I was willing to learn new things and to grow, I was able to provide value. And in turn, I was valued. Seek to go from knowing nothing to learning something to bring value. This is pretty much the key to everything I think!
• You never know where new opportunities will lead you, so stay open! When I first started that job organizing the stock room, believe me I wasn't excited about it. There was nothing glamorous about the job and it was hard to see then that this first assignment could lead to anything. But I did give that first assignment my all and it did lead to bigger and much better things. It's so important when you are first starting out to be open. It's important to be humble and to start with the entry level assignment, even if it sucks. Now, I'm not saying you should take a job below your skill set...that's actually a recipe for a lot of unhappiness. But I am saying that when you are brand new and starting in a new field, you sometimes have to start at level 0. The onus then is on you to find new opportunities to level up and to grow out of those level 0 assignments. This usually means stretching and learning new things and getting out of your comfort zone. If you can do that, I promise you will find yourself in new and wondrous places, doing new and wondrous things!

Pretty photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash