EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
BECOMING A PROJECT MANAGER
Have you noticed how some of your students can naturally bring other classmates together during group activities? Have you also seen how their leadership, confidence and ability to handle stress and conflicts within the group project has allowed them to lead their team to manage their group assignments? Then you might have a future project manager in your classroom!
Scroll down to find out about the possibilities of a Project Manager position in a tech environment, and let your students know about their potential future career!
Meet Laura Gavrilut
For this STEM Job Profile, we talked with Laura Gavrilut. Laura is an engineer by training and works for 21c Consultancy, an agency supporting the digital transformation. She is a seasoned Project Management professional with a strong track record structuring and delivering successful EU-funded innovation projects.
Having studied Computer Science, Laura has learned in a still male-dominated environment.
“If it would be to start all over again I wouldn’t change my career path. The engineering background gave me outstanding analytical and organisational skills.”
Curious to find out more about Laura’s job? Read about the related skills and scroll down to find and download her career sheet.
SKILLS
Find out about the key skills to become a Project Manager.
Problem-solving
Anticipating potential problems, generating possible solutions, evaluating ideas and impact: these are problem-solving related situations that a project manager faces during their career.
Collaboration
A project manager not only manages projects but also people. “Collaboration with the team and with external stakeholders is also important. With a team that supports you and with reliable collaborators, you can consider the job half done from the very beginning”.
Time Management
Working with projects often means juggling tasks and deadlines. As a project manager, one needs to be aware of the time constraints. Time management is the key to give colleagues, partners and collaborators enough time to complete their tasks before the deadlines.
Project Management
While it is not unusual to find project managers who first followed a different career path, “some basic project management skills are very welcomed to see how exactly to run a project in time and in the budget“.
Adaptability
As a project manager, you will inevitably deal with unpredictable situations. Whether the reasons are internal or external, a project manager should have broad shoulders and show creativity to adapt to these unexpected circumstances.
Communication
Not only should project managers be able to convey messages to partners, collaborators and team members, but they should also have basic technical skills, should there not be a communication specialist in their team. For example, “social media is an important part of our everyday life; this skill should also be noted.”.
Advice to take away
“I would encourage any girl wanting to enter the tech field to go for it if this is what she wants. Nothing can stand against a girl’s or woman’s determination and ambition!“
“…unconditionally support the child as this will give her/him/them confidence and a healthy environment to grow and flourish. Trust your instincts as teachers/parents but also take into consideration the desires of the children” – Laura Gavrilut
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: all the materials and content presented on this STEM Job profile have been co-created by STE(A)M IT, in collaboration with DUET, a project funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No.870697.
