Project Management Jobs - What Are They and How to Get One

By ZipRecruiter Marketplace Research Team

Project management jobs are crucial to businesses completing projects in a timely and cost-effective manner. As a project management professional, your job duties include planning workflows and scheduling the checkpoints of a project, ensuring the project stays on budget and meets the deadline, documenting every aspect of a project, and handling the supervision of the team of employees working on a project. You must be an effective communicator to liaise with different departments and teams. You can find project management jobs in engineering, aerospace, consulting, pharmaceuticals, and in almost every major industry.

To pursue a career in project management, you need a bachelor’s degree in business management or in a field relevant to the industry in which you want to work, such as marketing, computer science, engineering, information technology, construction, or economics. In addition to a college degree, you can earn professional certifications to demonstrate your project management skills and knowledge base. For example, the Project Management Institute (PMI) offers a course and exam that result in the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification.

If you started in a different career, you can transition into a project management job. Look for opportunities to join project teams in your current role, and pay attention to the duties of the project manager. Ask to shadow them if you can. You can choose to go back to school and earn a degree in project management, or take a certification course to learn project management workflow strategies with a lesser time commitment than returning to college. When you feel ready, ask your boss for an opportunity to manage a project or look for project management jobs with other employers.

A good project manager must be well organized and able to keep track of multiple aspects of a project, and sometimes oversee more than one project at one time. As a project manager, your job includes planning the workflow of each project and checking in with each involved department. You need strong time management and task management skills, and you must be comfortable working under pressure to meet a deadline. You need good communication skills to interact with all the employees working on the project and ensure they complete their portion of the work.