Raymond Seah Blog

As a project manager, your career may be just beginning, and you may be enjoying the challenges of developing team leadership skills. Similarly, you may be in the middle of your career, having had some success but not certain as to what activities you want to experience for the second half of your career. Finally, your career may be fully developed as it currently exists, and you may have become curious as to what exciting professional activities you could assemble for an active retirement.

Regardless of your current career stage, you must take responsibility for the direction of your career; no one else can do it for you. Although you are currently working under the gaze of a benevolent mentor, you may come to work one Monday and discover that your mentor has been terminated, has decided to leave the company for an exciting start-up venture, or has been transferred to an international assignment.

As previously mentioned, a solid employment contract implying gainful employment for excellent performance does not exist. That mode of operating is a relic. If you do not take responsibility for your career, then no one will. Additionally, without taking responsibility for your career, you are as a cork on a lake, going somewhere, but not necessarily along the path that would be best for you.

We have had the opportunity over many years and in many different settings to work closely with team members and other professionals as these individuals achieve professional and personal success in their careers. We have come to believe that the successful and contented professional has consciously or unconsciously followed three principles for career management.

Initially, this rule appears to be neither profound nor complex, and in many ways, this is true. However, the significance of this career rule becomes evident when you listen closely to people who are considering career changes. We have heard professionals, particularly those professionals in mid-career and those considering a career transition, utter the following words:

Person 2. “When I was in college, everyone told me that I’d be good at engineering. That was essentially on target. I got good grades and had few problems getting that first job. I’ve been with the company for 3 years now and I’m doing okay, but am not sure this is something that I want to do forever.”

Person 3. “They told me I’d be great at project management, but I’m not sure if project management is something I want to do. I enjoy myself more when I’m deeply involved with technical material, and now I seem to get stuck in too many meetings, since I’ve been working as a project manager. Guess I’ll get used to that at some point. Hope so.”

All of these project team members have one aspect in common: they never aggressively took the time to engage in the process of considering what they really wanted to do professionally. They achieved success in their work, and they moved forward, but their paths were unfocussed. In many ways, their success in completing the task or job before them “seduced” them into a professional passivity during which they were not taking control of the direction of their careers.

When you do not take the time to create a system to consider what you really want to do, a situation may develop in which:

• A degree of professional success exists, but personal satisfaction and happiness may be wanting.
• The current path has reached a dead-end point, with no alternatives in sight.
• Organizational change (e.g., merger, acquisition, reorganization, downsizing) takes place, and you are caught unaware with no active strategy for career survival.
• Peers in the company, and in the profession in general, are more suited for future work because they have initiated more active career management strategies, such as self-assessment experiences, executive coaching, or mentoring.

The best way to know what to do with your career is to know who you are. Knowing yourself is frequently the result of having placed yourself in situations in which you can experience formal or informal self-assessment opportunities.

Formal self-assessment experiences are best represented through career interest and personal style assessments using standardized tests and questionnaires. Consulting psychologists, skilled in the interface of personality assessment and career planning, often use these instruments. Traditionally, these consulting psychologists employ tests that measure:

• Personality and personal style
• Work and career values
• Interest and skill measures

There are many approaches to presenting the results of these assessment tools. One approach that has been effective is one in which the consulting psychologist spends 2 to 3 hours with the project manager actively discussing the results of the assessment. This interaction and discussion is crucial because it helps you to incorporate the material and discuss it in ways that are personally meaningful for you. It can also be valuable when the discussion is tape recorded, with the tape provided to you at the conclusion of the meeting. This assessment allows you, the project manager, to become actively involved in “thinking out loud” during the discussion meeting without becoming distracted by taking notes. You should also be able to receive a booklet of results with interpretive materials for your ongoing review.

Informal self-assessment experiences can be equally valuable. As the word “informal” suggests, these methods involve more casual approaches to assessment. These methods are also directed at helping you gain clear information about your personality, your interests, and your values but do not involve taking tests. These methods are more subjective and self-driven, and they consist of efforts such as:

The following rule rarely loses any importance in managing a career: creating a vibrant and active professional network—before you need it—is a key to active career management.

A professional network is a group of people who have knowledge of you or the trends within your profession and could become valuable resources for you when you want to make some type of career change or transition in the future.

Some examples of people in a professional network include:

• Current co-workers and superiors
• Previous co-workers and superiors
• Acquaintances from school, at conferences, and through professional organizations
• Interested people you know personally or through the community
• Special people who you should meet because of common interests
• People who are known for having their fingers on the pulse of the profession

People in your network can come from many different sources. The key point is that you must be active in creating your network before it becomes necessary. This proactive approach to network development also helps you stay current with changes in your field. The purpose of developing a network is to create relationships that can be beneficial for both people throughout a career.

There are many tangible ways to develop a professional network. The following examples are a few techniques that you can use:

Most people are too passive in developing and maintaining a professional network. It is often said that it is important to develop a network, but they fail to do so because they are too busy or too tired. That may be true. Your challenge is to find a way to describe network creation and maintenance not as an extra task to complete, but as a core activity that you should embrace weekly regardless of how busy you may be.

As one moves to higher levels of responsibility within an organization, issues of chemistry determine success. Chemistry is that unexpressed feeling that exists between two people that tells them they have something in common, that they like each other, or that they can work well together. You cannot manufacture good chemistry between yourself and your peers or superiors, but you can do your best to create the optimal conditions. Work with a supportive and respectful style. Occasionally, that helps with the chemistry. At other times the chemistry is simply not there, will not be there later, and you should look for another assignment or accept things as they are.

Closely related to good chemistry is the concept of successfully managing upward toward your functional manager, project sponsor, and other superiors. The project manager who can manage upward successfully is able to:

For example, when you have a random encounter with a superior or a sponsor, such as in the cafeteria or on the elevator, have prepared a 2- or 3-minute summary about your current project that you can discuss. This summary should be in the form of a “sound bite” to discuss rather than simply making “small talk.” Search for other opportunities to give presentations about your project so your sponsor remains informed.

Managing upward means consciously developing an approach to nurturing this key relationship, meeting the needs of your sponsor while shining light on your accomplishments.

Being a project manager for the present does not mean that this role is best suited for you or that this role will last for the duration of your career.

As previously stated in this text, people may be promoted into project management leadership roles primarily because of technical competency. Frequently, insufficient time is invested in evaluating the prospective project manager regarding basic management skills and abilities. If you are in a project management role and do not believe you are best suited for a leadership role, then it is important to accept that realization with a positive frame of mind and begin looking for other ways to make a contribution within your organization and profession.

Not everyone enjoys or thrives in the complex role of project manager. Temperament, interests, and comfort levels all contribute to determining whether such a role is best. Professional (and personal) life is too short to be in a management role when your temperament and interests are telling you that you should be in the role of an individual contributor, as opposed to being a project manager.

Trends in the workplace have lead to the creation of a new way of working—the portfolio career. This type of career can be ideally suited for the project management professional, assuming it captures your interest.

A portfolio career is a career in which the professional is involved in a number of professional activities at one time, conducted under the banner of being self-employed. In essence, the professional manages a “portfolio” holding the various career activities.

Portfolio careers can be exciting for the professional who wants to be involved in a variety of activities and discovers that, in all likelihood, it is not realistic to expect that one can locate a traditional salaried position in which these varied interests would be satisfied.

The following is a vignette that illustrates a portfolio career that one project manager designed:

Carlo had worked for years as a project manager for a software developer in San Francisco. His project management duties had involved his overseeing a group of designers and programmers, as well as serving as the interface to the manufacturing and marketing departments. At one point in the middle of his career, he embarked on a journey of soul searching, looking for some new ways to use his skills.

He resigned from the organization and gradually assembled what he would later describe as his portfolio career. Initially, he became involved in teaching a course at the local state university because he had always enjoyed mentoring junior staff members when he worked in an organization. Incrementally, he added new activities until his portfolio consisted of the following:

Evidently, Carlo had a number of diverse interests, all within the field of project management. However, these interests would likely be unrecognized if he had remained as an employee for one company or organization. He discovered his variety of activities to be highly stimulating and exciting. His choice of pursuing his career through the format of the portfolio career enabled him to learn “what he wanted to be when he grew up.”

Portfolio careers can be particularly attractive for the professional seeking a meaningful work-life balance. These careers can be exciting, but they are not for everyone. To feel comfortable in a portfolio career, one must:

• Be able to tolerate a lack of predicable structure (such as not having the same job every day).
• Be comfortable with periods of intense activity followed by periods of minimal activity—feast or famine.
• Feel comfortable in an entrepreneurial environment in which one must initiate ongoing business development efforts (because portions of one’s portfolio will reach closure at some point).
• Have an acceptance of the economic uncertainties of self-employment.

Some people manage the issues of an unclear work structure and the economic ups and downs of self-employment by creating an exit strategy from full-time employment by which one leaves with a small contract from the former employer to complete some tasks currently under way. This economic and psychological “bridging” to self-employment can help ease some potential economic and emotional discomfort of being independent and has become quite popular for many professionals. By retaining contact with the previous employer, when the portfolio career becomes too stressful or uncertain, it is easier perhaps to return to full-time work within an organization.

Any professional in today’s fluid and changing work environment should have a current résumé that is up to date and polished. Even when you are not currently in the job-search mode, having a current resume performs a number of positive functions such as:

It would not be advisable to be caught in a situation in which you are unexpectedly asked to present a resumé for the perfect job that you have always wanted and then have to throw something together for that first interview. Even when you tell the interviewer that you “only heard about the job yesterday and had no need for a resumé for over 3 years,” you still may have made a first impression that was less than desirable. Your resumé, although “acceptable,” may be insufficient to make you a primary candidate for the job. Unfortunately, you never have a second chance to create another first impression.

It is not the purpose or scope of this section to discuss résumés in detail; that is best left to the array of current publications available at any quality bookstore or through Internet resources. However, some key points about the resumé will be offered, based on our experiences, which may help you guide your efforts in this area:

• Make the resumé results-oriented, telling the reader not just what you did (such as “served as project manager for software development”) but what you achieved (such as “decreased software turnaround time by an average of 13% per project”).
• Telling the reader what you achieved creates a vision of you as an action-oriented professional, and that impression is aided when you use action verbs in your resumé.
• Use action verbs such as expanded, improved, created, developed, reduced, achieved, and built.
• When appropriate, use numbers to quantify and support the achievements that are being presented in the resumé narrative through the use of the action verbs.

In addition to identifying and nurturing prospective references, you should also spend some time and effort in qualifying the references. This process of qualifying a reference involves talking with them about what they expect to say about you, as well as giving them some information about what you feel the interviewer would want to know about you. In addition, tell your references something specific about the job and the company that you are pursuing so that they may tailor their comments accordingly.

During the process of qualifying a reference, keep these thoughts in mind:

• Choose references that will have credibility with the interviewer and whose background is relevant to the position for which you are applying.
• Make certain the references are people who, even when they are contacted at a less than optimal time—such as in the middle of a very busy day—will respond positively about you and will be willing to serve as your reference.
• Inform your reference about your specific accomplishments, traits, and abilities that you think the interviewer should hear. Simply remembering these accomplishments does not mean that your reference will also remember them.
• Talk with your reference about your specific areas for professional development. You do not want to have any surprises.
• Similarly, you do not want to have any surprises when the interviewer asks your reference for the reasons why you left the organization. Make certain that you are both in agreement on this explanation.

As you begin to inform the outside world about yourself and your desire to find a new position, you should be able to tell your story concisely and within a limited amount of time. This focused and practiced self-description is called your 2-minute introduction.

A 2-minute introduction is the “speech” that you would give to someone who meets you at a conference, tells you that they have heard you are looking for a new position, and asks you to tell them who you are and what you want to do.

Margaret, a project manager in the aerospace industry, created a 2-minute introduction that began as follows:

“I am a senior project manager with 11 years of experience in leading multidisciplinary teams in the development of innovative technologies that have been used successfully in the space shuttle program. I have managed teams in multicultural settings for organizations operating in both the public and private sectors.

At this point in my career, I am really excited about the possibility of joining a start-up venture, in an industry related to aerospace, in which I could obtain a senior management position in the operations area of the business. In this type of setting, I would be able to bring value to the company through my many years of experience, my well-honed leadership skills, and my ability to motivate a diverse employee population.”

Allocate your time wisely when presenting your 2-minute introduction. A good rule of thumb is to use 25% of the 2 minutes to describe your past and your previous accomplishments and the other 75% to describe what you want to do in the future.

The 2-minute introduction, tailored somewhat to the specifics of the listener, is designed to quickly and forcefully give the listener the picture of you as an achiever and as someone who is excited and competent to pursue the next venture. You need not specify a particular job when giving a 2-minute introduction, but provide as many details as you can about the setting, the duties, and the role that you want to have in the next position.