Once upon a time, I was a project manager. At the time, I had to learn on the job because the whole Internet things was that new. We were all reading Idiot’s guides to Project Management or maybe taking the coveted PMP certification. It was one part organizational skills and one part technical skills. And dare I say it felt “highly technical” because technology was not so integrated into our every day!
Look around you now, and you’ll see that you are extremely employable in our tech city if you are a PM. Program managers differ in some companies and in other companies they are like Project managers. Essentially you might read Technical PM, PM or Prog. Manager and qualify for all three.
Or, you might read PM and Project coordinator and realize that actually, some PM jobs are like glorified admin assistants. And there are SO MANY of these jobs available.
It causes me to wonder, how did we all get so busy that we needed Project Managers? My partner and I could use one to help us out – seriously. But we are both our own PM’s, with everything else we do as entrepreneurs (I’m just not that good at it anymore!)
Somethings gotta give with this role, because I can only imagine that it is probably another reason why it’s hard to find your passion at work, when you are a glorified organizer. You are not really a leader in most scenarios – and maybe you’re empowered in less than 40% of the scenarios (because lines are always blurred and there might be a fair amount of last minute delegation that falls to you). If we were to do a study to figure out why there are so many PM’s and how we can create less Pee-Emmy roles and more EMPOWERED roles, (without giving folks twice the amount of work because that’s not the point), I wonder if we can find a way to reinvent the organizational design in tech companies?
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