I walked into my first project management role as an engineer, not a trained PM. I didn’t really go in willingly, I just sort of transitioned, as so many engineers do. I found out (to my dismay) that the salary ceiling for design engineers is a low one. I had spent only as many years designing as I had actually studying how to design. My company could now pay someone with less experience less money to do my job. And do it 80% as well as I could. The only way they would pay me more money is if I supervised and guided a few of the newbies. Got their quality of work up to my usual standards. So I became a glorified babysitter. Plus some other admin duties to fill my time. I was now a Junior Project Manager.

I don’t know what I expected life to be like, but I was definitely surprised. In some good ways and some bad. Here are some things I wish I knew.

Number One:

The first thing to know is that it’s much less about technical skills and much more about people skills. Think it’s all about KPI’s? I hardly look at them. I might do that once every couple of days or once a week. Sometimes once a month, depending on the stage of the project. But what I do every single day is communicate with people. Upset people. Confused people. People whose expectations are not being met. In essence, I spend time trying to get people on my side. That is the biggest part of the job. I wish I’d known that going in, and I really wish I’d been trained in it.

Number Two:

Professional development is pretty much non-existent. Once you’re in a career, with the exception of a very few small companies, almost no structured, formal professional development happens. You do your work. You are expected to do your work and to just keep doing your work. Your learning and growth depends on you. Unless you put a bunch of effort into professionally developing yourself outside of your work time, you really don’t learn very much throughout the years except for the job skills. And therefore, it’s so important to find a resource that you trust and learn from it. And those might be mentors, they might be websites, they might be online courses. Professional development is in your hands.

Number Three:

The third thing I learned quickly is that stress comes from uncertainty. There’s so much that we know about projects, but there’s so much that we don’t. We really don’t know what the impact of our actions is going to be. We don’t know what stakeholders are going to say, we don’t know what our boss is going to say, what problems are going to come. Whether it might rain on the building site, or the CEO might cut our funding. We look at risk management and we think to ourselves, "Oh, this could go wrong," but most often the problems some from the things we don’t know about. Stress comes from uncertainty. To keep myself sane, I need to cling to whatever certainties I can find. In processes. In routine. In trying to be predictable in my actions. Focus on the things you can control while you’re in the eye of the storm.

Number Four:

You need to plan for the delays. Delays are inevitable and I am yet to meet a project that hasn’t been delayed. If the project has even more than just a wee tiny bit of complexity, delay is guaranteed. We budget for best-case scenarios, we put a little bit of factor of safety into it, and we think that that’s OK. But what we really should be doing is sensitizing ourselves to the fact that delays are pretty much inevitable. We should be planning for the delays proactively; we should be able to absorb the occasional large delay in our project. Because they will come. It is just as important to tell your stakeholders this. We don’t want to seem as if we are not in control of the schedule, but we need to make it clear that slippage happens. Major slippage happens too. Make plans to mitigate them but don’t imagine that they won’t happen to you.

Number Five:

Perhaps the biggest thing I learned is that you need to make your own job satisfaction. Project successful happens seldom, and the satisfaction that you get from it is very fleeting. It passes very quickly. You could spend weeks, months or years involved in a project (completely stressed out) just to experience 1 or 2 days of happiness when a project is successfully completed. You need to find a way to make your own happiness along the way. Find happiness in your work, happiness in your inter-personal relations, and satisfaction with yourself. Send emails congratulating your team on their successes. Document your thoughts. Journal and write about the things you are proud of and discuss them with your family and friends. Try to focus on the positives or you can easily sink into doom and gloom.

Conclusion

Transitioning from engineer to project manager has been revealing. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. There were mistakes along the way but I am happy I made the career switch. Hopefully these insights are useful to you, whatever stage you are in with your project management career.