How to land on your dream job as a project manager?
Looking for a new job is often a rather tedious task, independent of the industry you are going for. But why should it be tedious, difficult or any other boring word – why not look at the search for a new job as a challenge?
Whether you want to find a project manager job, assistant project manager job or just something simply related to project management – you are looking for this specific job because you want it, you need it, you like it, right? If that’s so, you should be enthusiastic about finding the job of your dreams.
Sometimes it can take lots of time to find the job, but you should never stop looking. Persistence pays off.
Where should you start?
Do you have a CV?
Sometimes you don’t need it, but more often you do. And once the time comes to send it to the potential employer, you better have a good one. Do you know how to write a CV? If you don’t, have it done for you by professionals. If you are serious about getting the job, think about what a CV actually is. It’s not a blog posts, it’s not a simple letter to someone you know, it’s not your admission papers to some university. It’s a sales letter to the human resources guy in the company you want to work for. And sales letter needs to sell. It doesn’t need to introduce you, it needs to sell you to your potential employer.
Who do you know?
The easiest way to start is always to ask around. We all know a lot of people and each of them knows a lot of people. And if you spread the word that you’re a qualified project manager looking for a challenging work, you might actually get some great contacts this way.
Who are not looking?
One of the least used way of searching for a new job is contacting the companies you might want to work for. Without them actually looking for someone publicly. You see – it’s easy to go to some job site, submit your CV and start searching for available jobs or keep hoping someone will find you instead. While it’s something you could or should do as well, it is not an easy to find a job this way. Why? Simply because that’s how everyone are doing it.
Instead, you could choose 10 companies you’d like to work for and open communication lines with them. It doesn’t matter they are not actively looking for a new employee. Very often free spots are filled by the people from the inside (and by inside I mean people who are acquaintances of the current employees) and thus the job never becomes available. Yet, if they know about you too – you are already almost acquainted with them. And often, if your self-presentation is good, and as a potential project manager it MUST be, you might find a job this way even though you didn’t know they even had an availability.
For every publicly known job opportunity there might be 30 people interested in it. Your chances are 30 to 1. For every 10 companies you contact, there’s a great chance one of them is looking for a new project manager right now or in the near future and in this case, if they already know of a great project manager, you, you might get the job without any competition. The odds are in your favour.
Or maybe some job portals?
And if everything else fails, go to job portals. There are hundreds of them around. Just to name a few where you could find a job as a project manager :
- http://www.pmhut.com/job-hunting
- http://www.projectmanagement.computerjobs.com/
- http://www.dice.com
- http://www.jobserve.com
- http://www.eFinancialCareers.com
- http://www.monster.com
- http://www.guru.com
Just to name a few – and don’t forget the local job portals either.
Tags: assistant project management jobs, project management jobs, project manager job