Let's Manage the Heck Outta This...

Who doesn't take a deep breath when The Martian's hero, Dr. Watney, played by the scene-commanding Matt Damon, realizes he's in a huge pickle and resolves he's going to use the best of his knowledge and his strongest drive to puzzle his way out of the predicament. About a year ago, I realized that my career was in a bit of pickle, although much less life-threatening and certainly less dusty.

The fictional Dr. Watney's goal was to survive until his rescue arrived. After much introspection on my career at the time, I realized that the people in charge were not sending any rescue, but were working diligently to make the daily job even more challenging. I realized that to live the life I wanted, I needed to find a different career where I had room to grow, more autonomy, with financial awards commensurate with my experience and expertise. Like Dr. Watney, I had to bring my resources, talents, and my strongest drives to manage my career-change project.

Projects inhabit so many aspects of life--buying a house, taking a trip, (like the 6,000 mile 36 day trip where I took this photo) learning a new language, raising children and getting them into the colleges they want (and finding a way to pay for it without putting them into crushing debt), saving for retirement--changing careers simply became the latest project. Like all projects, my career switch began with an idea--I needed a change.

Initially, I spent a considerable amount of time, effort, and reflection investigating ways I could improve the present situation. I had been at that job for 10 years and thoroughly enjoyed most of what I did all day, and all evening, and most of the weekend. I loved working with my colleagues and we had built an extremely effective team together. Couldn't I simply adjust some parameters of the job to return to enjoying it? During the ideation time, I also spent time deeply considering the questions "What do I want out of a new career?" and "What do I want from my life outside of my career?" After hundreds of miles of walk-taking, thousands of pages of book reading, and months of podcast listening on the subjects of career change, personal productivity, and goal-fulfillment, I determined that leaving actually was a viable option to getting what my family and I wanted and needed.

My uncle, a very successful businessperson in his time, used to say, "Don't tell me it can't be done. Tell me what it takes, then we'll decide." So my next question became, "What will it take to make this career change, and do I want to do that?" I spent several weeks researching what people typically do when they leave the career I was leaving, how did they go about preparing for that change, what possible careers interested and inspired me, and what skills and people did I need to know to make this change. After carefully measuring of the costs and benefits of staying in place or starting a new career, I decided that the time had indeed come for me to challenge myself and take on the Starting a New Career project

Project Management came up pretty early in the conversation. It had actually been lurking in the air long before the situation at my job became so misaligned with my personal, financial, and professional goals. My husband is a Senior Executive at a video game development company and he works from our home studio. One evening I brought dinner out to the studio and he invited me to sit and wait for a few minutes. He finished up a conversation with HR about the recent hire of a newly graduated college student for a Project Management position. The person was being hired, right out of college, for a salary more than twice my current salary, and I had a Master's Degree, and 10 years of experience in my industry.

You have to understand that after work and on weekends, my husband moonlights as an award-winning novelist, and I am his book editor. We have been working together on his books for about 6 years. We know each other pretty well, and we still like each other, which is pretty awesome. He finished his conversation with HR, turned around and said, "You'd be a darn good Project Manager. If you ever consider leaving your current position, you might think about it." I didn't take his comment to heart at that moment because I was content at my current spot.

As part of my research into "What do I need to know to become a Project Manager?" I was listening to Andy Kaufman's People and Projects podcast. I know, I talked about him in the last blog already, but the man is such an interesting and thoughtful interviewer, he asks all the questions I want to ask, and his guests are simply fascinating! Listening to Mr. Kaufman interviewing different thought leaders really got my brain juices flowing again. I could feel my heart beating with excitement as I considered the possibilities of how my people and organization skills come together to make an effective project manager. The first day I listened to the podcast, I was hooked. I binged about eight episodes. I took notes, I composed blog posts in my head and wrote notes about those, I started thinking of ways I could apply what I was learning in the podcast to my current position. I realized that I was already doing many of the processes and skills that were being discussed. In addition, using some of Mr. Kaufman's guests' ideas, I could improve what I was doing at my current job to become more efficient and effective. For the first time in many years, I felt the heat of a passionate challenge burning in my brain. I actually could be a darn good Project Manager. I had actually been doing it for years, in many companies, just under different titles.

Considering the product cycle of my position, I knew I still had a few months before I could leave on good terms. I did not want to leave colleagues and supervisors who had been very good to me in the lurch. I made my big-picture plan and calendared it into my planner. I needed first to resurrect my resume from the technology of 10 years ago when I had last looked for a position, second, to re-craft my website so prospective employers could have easy access to a more complete picture of my skills, third, to upskill by learning more about best practices and the processes of Project Management, and finally, to revive and build my network. I wrote down dates of anticipated completion, mid-term goals, short goals, and a list of daily goals. At the end of each week, I have been revisiting the list and I have adjusted goals and parameters as needed.

I'm looking forward to next week. I will have some extra time in my schedule and I've signed up for some classes to build my skills and Amazon delivered two of my books today. It feels good to be making progress. It feels good to have a new challenge. It feels good, the future looks bright, and it's been so long since I've been able to say that.

Hopefully, by the time anyone reads this, I will have made another post about the new skills and new language of Project Management that I've learned this week! Until then, let's do the best we can with what we have at this time!