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Blog AuthorB K Subramanya
PublishedOct 09, 2024
Views2,388
Read Time15 mins
Table of Content
Project management is a crucial discipline that ensures that particular projects are planned, executed, monitored, and completed effectively. The team with project management experience has an important role in almost every industry, from manufacturing to education to hospitality to aviation and marketing. If you want to become a project manager, you must have sound communication, leadership, and problem-solving skills.
Whether it is about organizing an event, planning to architect a building, managing a team, or launching a new product in the market, everything requires years of project management experience. The experience in different industries also helps you navigate through the challenges of the projects and deliver successful outcomes. However, along with having these skills, it is important to have professional certifications in hand so that you can apply for better job opportunities.
In this article, I will share my 10+ years of project management experience. I will discuss what qualifications you will require to manage a project, along with real-life examples and best practices to gain experience. So, stay with me till the end of this blog post, as I will also help you understand the future scope with project management experience and how you can make a successful career in this job profile.
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Whether you are leading a team of a small or a bigger group, the skill that you use to manage them is briefly termed project management experience. What all the effort you put into directing, planning, leading, managing, and executing projects, everything counts as experience in handling the project.
However, it takes time to master project management, and for that, you can either keep hunting for opportunities aside from your current job role or you can enrol in a reputable institute to get professional project management training. The latter one will help you gain real-time experience and a certificate of completion.
Once you understand what is project management experience, let me navigate you through the key components required to manage any project. When I was recently handling a project to complete building an IT infrastructure, the following skill set helped me to plan, execute, manage, and deliver the end result smoothly to my company. You should master these skills before taking charge of an entire project and monitoring it on a daily basis to complete it within budget and deadline.
When you start something new, you always begin by making a plan or an outline, don’t you? At this stage, the first thing that needs to be decided is how things will be carried out. After that, you move on to decide what sources to use, which strategies to implement, what the main goal to achieve, and how the team can be guided.
So, before you actually start a real time project, you should learn to plan it on paper and organize things so that you can follow the roadmap for smooth execution.
Also Read: What is a War Room in Project Management?
Once the planning part is done, you cannot rashly take steps and execute it without determining the overall budget of the project. It is important to determine when and where to invest the money so that you can manage the budget properly.
There are several factors you should take into account when planning a budget, such as available resources, tools, raw materials, transportation, and many more. Although the total cost may vary, your estimation will help you stay within financial limits so that future issues can be managed upfront.
One of the most important skills that you need to master is time management. From planning to execution to handing over the completed project to the client, everything you need to finish within a certain timeframe so that you can gain brownie points.
Learning time management skills help you take the most out of your team, fix the challenges if you face anything, and complete the work or project without overburdening. It helps you build a reputation as well as gives you enough time to review your work, make necessary changes, and be calm at the end.
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There isn’t one segment to see while working on a project; you need to work with different teams to collaborate to manage different segments. You cannot assign development tasks to an employee who is responsible for product quality testing and vice-versa.
As a project manager, you need to allocate human resources accordingly and assign specific tasks to designated teams. So, you must learn and master how to strategically distribute the available resources to different teams so that the work can progress seamlessly.
The execution of a planned project seems quiet to hear, right? But in reality, it is the most difficult task that you may experience as a project manager. So, while assisting someone or during your internship program, you must be attentive to get trained in execution skills.
From communicating with the teams and clients to managing the money flow, everything must be executed as planned. You may face various challenges while making things work, so you must learn how to promptly address them without hindering the progress of the project.
Mastering documentation skills is also a part of project management experience, as you keep track of the data so that you can know how much work is done. It is important to collect them every day because this will help you plan the next day’s to-do list and also determine which segment needs to be sped up or pay attention to.
You should also learn to use some effective document management tools such as Filestage, TeamGantt, Workzone, Google Drive, MS Office, and more. It will help you synchronize the data and have clear communication with clients when they ask about the project.
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You must have five fundamental skills to qualify as an experienced project manager, which can be gained and mastered over the years. However, enrolling in a professional project management course and getting PMP certification can speed up the process and make you qualified to handle a project. You can also work as an intern, trainer, or leader to enhance the following project management abilities:
Boost Clarity and Efficiency – Get started with effective Project Communication Planning.
In the industry, there are several tasks that will help you gain project management experience. Here are some real-life project management examples I am sharing based on handling a handful of projects in the last decade.
Once upon a time, I was handling an educational program development project for an esteemed online institute. They were required to upgrade their existing curriculum and modules and revamp the way they used to deliver the lectures. There, I first designed a roadmap by considering the existing procedures, available human resources, course management platform, and the future scope. Then, I had several meetings with the team, higher authority, and other departments to plan the hiring process for subject matter experts, create a new curriculum that demands updated information, optimise convenient course delivery facilities, and much more. Finally, I coordinated with the finance department and the team for approval, and then I successfully executed the project as per the plan.
Here is another example of project management experience I have in the software industry. There was a company that wanted to launch human resource planning software to help businesses ease their hiring process. So, my prime responsibility was handling the entire team working on this project. I used to work with research and development guys, coordinating with clients, meeting with developers and software testers to monitor the work progress, and the project charge to ensure everything was going well and the end result met the client’s expectations.
Here are some more project management experience examples that will help you better understand the practical scenario.
Also Read: Is Project Management a Good Career?
When I started my career almost a decade ago, there were not enough resources for guidelines, finding the right career path, predicting future trends and more. So, I started my project management career with just a short-term goal. However, after gaining experience for a few years, I realised that I had chosen the right career as there is endless scope in this particular stream.
After handling projects in 20+ industries, I would rather say that it’s almost impossible for a company to boost productivity and revenue without having an experienced project management team. You also require project management experience to appear in the PMP examination. This will help you get professional certification so that you can apply for a high-salaried job.
Further, having experience in project management help you with the following.
Managing a certain project is very hectic and needs a lot of planning and monitoring. Sometimes, a few things may get out of your control or go wrong. When you have years of experience in hand, you will be able to navigate through these challenges in a better way. Whether it is handling the team members, allocating the tasks, managing the budget, or convincing the client, you will be able to come up with the best solutions proactively.
When you begin your career as a project manager, you may have trouble completing it on time due to various reasons, but as you gain experience, you become better with each project. When you become an expert, using techniques and underpinning tools helps you complete the work on time or earlier.
As a project manager, you will have to do planning, budgeting, execution, monitoring, communicating, and a lot more tasks which may keep you juggling. So, when you gain experience, it is easy to handle teams, developers, marketers, managers, or engineers. You can make a list of tasks based on priority and skillset, and assign them to be completed on time while keeping quality standards in mind.
If you are working in a certain industry and handling the same type of projects you have done in the past, your experience helps here. It makes your process easy and offers you new opportunities to work better in the future. You can also learn to develop or tailor the approach that will give you definite and better results than previous ones.
Also Read: Project Execution
Having hands-on experience or certifications in various phases of project management is what counts as project management experience. When you stand out in the world with these experiences, there are a multitude of opportunities waiting for you to make a great career. However, before you start working professionally and look for better opportunities, you can consider the following to effectively get skills and experience in managing a project.
If you want to start earning a handsome salary in your field as a project manager, then you must get professional training from the institutes that can offer you to work on real-life projects. Learning from an esteemed academy not only saves you time but also gives you insights into simple and complex project management skills. You will be monitored by the professionals so that you complete your training, get the certificate and be prepared to handle big projects in IT, education, marketing, architecture, and other sectors.
If you want to start big, then you must get a professional project management certificate, as it is proof of your skills. To do this, you will have to qualify for the PMP examination or get a CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management) certification. PMP certifies that you are well experienced in the industry, whereas CAPM is for practitioners or beginners who don’t have much experience.
Also Read: Google Project Management Certificate vs PMP
A short-term internship in your specific field or industry is an excellent way to get first-hand experience. Whether you are in the fashion industry, hospitality industry, architectural field, or others, you can take up internships or volunteer work to sharpen your skills. It does not matter whether you are getting paid or not, as you will be able to build a network while gaining expertise in your field.
If you aim to be in the position of a project manager, then you must try to grab every opportunity that is available to gain experience in the industry. There are several jobs that you can pick, whether or not they have openings for manager positions, and slowly learn things before starting your career. Below, I have mentioned some of the most preferred job titles similar to project managers. It will help you get project management experience at the beginning of your career.
As an event planner, you will be able to develop your planning, executing, budgeting, and organizing skills, and you will be the decision-maker of the event. From communication with the clients to creating a roadmap and making the event successful, it will be in your hands to determine how you will make things work.
As a training coordinator, you can sharpen your execution and organizational skills as you have to come up with techniques to increase productivity. A company has both new and old employees, so it will be your duty to organize and execute educational training so that they can learn and implement it at work. Not only that, you will also have to see that each one at the workplace attends the training session.
As a personal assistant (PA), you can develop time management and organizational skills while handling other micro projects within the organization. Keeping records of your boss’s meetings and schedules and preparing documents in advance are some of the prime roles of a PA. Along with that, you can work on your public relations skills while communicating with the clients and other employees of the organization.
There are several ways to get project management experience, but one of the most preferred ways is getting PMP Certification Training. It helps you save time in learning while allowing you to get real-time expertise by handling live projects. Having planning, budgeting, executing, organizing, and communicating skills can help you become a reputable and excellent project manager. Although you can refine your skills with time by handling several projects, you must go through PMP Training delivered by PMI authorized training partner to start your professional career early on with hands-on experience.
Also Read: Creative Project Manager
Productivity, customer satisfaction, return on investment, cost variance, and gross profit margin are the key metrics that quantify your project management experience.
Volunteering for projects, internships, assistance, and workshops, as well as joining a professional institute for training, can help you gain experience in project management.
Having project management certification and experience can increase your demand in the market as it validates your skills and knowledge. The more experience you have, the more chances of earning you will get.
If you want to start and establish your career in the managerial sector, then you can do courses and training in these areas:
Hands-on experience in handling projects may bring along a lot of challenges for you to tackle and derive expected results. Thus, it enhances your thinking capability as well as your problem-solving skills while organizing things in a structured manner.
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05 Jul 2019
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