EDITOR’S NOTE: Each month in our newsletter Project Management Tipoffs, Arras People project management consultants try to answer questions from candidates about the job market as it pertains to PPM. How to Manage a Camel will take a day of out the next few weeks to allow you to see the expertise we have on some of the more difficult questions you may have about PPM recruitment and job hunting.
What follows below is the question and a portion of our response from our January 2010 issue. For a full glimpse, check out our Q&A from the January 2010 edition of Tipoffs (PDF).
Having been a member of the Royal Navy for several successful years and finding myself back in civilian life, I’ve decided that project management would be the right career path for me. Yet I’m uncertain on where to begin or how my Naval experience can translate to projects. I hear a lot about qualifications like PRINCE2, but I’m not sure if its the best methodology out there. What would you recommend? – Andrew
Thanks for your questions and comments. One thing we have found over time from recruiting project managers is that military personnel like yourself tend to make solid project managers. Quite often, we place people with military experience into the variety of roles we have on offer. Diligence, transferable work experience and innate focus to detail and performance in a deadline-wracked environment give them the upper hand over many civilian life newcomers to the project industry – yours Andrew is a level of experience many other qualifications and methodologies can’t buy.
What can separate the “civilian” from the military personnel entering the project workforce is twofold. Firstly it all comes down to how you display your experiences to date and that one small detail – domain terminology. All too often, someone with your background may have excellent project management experience already, but your experiences don’t translate well to interviewers because you don’t ‘speak the language’, as it were. Prejudicial? Sure, there’s a little bit of that…
Read the rest of the response in our January 2010 issue, which also features some stunning pre-release details from the 2010 PM Benchmark Report about how rarely candidates had used social media in their job hunting.
Image courtesy bilobilv and re-used with permission.
Twitter: Andybud
One quick point to share based on a conversation I had with my father who was career RAF (joined at 15 and stayed until retirement) and then went on to work in a fortune 500 multinational company for several years. When he joined the private sector he was shocked by the working behaviours he saw, he had thought that the private sector would be a step up in productivity/efficiency and work rates. But what he saw was conflicting priorities, people not motivated to work (some just waiting for retirement) but his biggest shock was the organisational hierarchy problem, ie in the armed services if a higher ranking officer gives an order it should be carried out regardless of the department either person is in, the private sector response is ‘I will only do what my line manager instructs’. Add to that the fact that more often than not a PM will have no actual authority over their project resources, can make project management more challenging/frustrating. Getting a qualification in project management is great on many levels, but you can feel rest assured that your project management experience in the armed service may well be more disciplined and methodical than is currently performed in many companies.