Need to Manage a Career Change? Try SCRUM

One of the major challenges of a career change is to manage all of the details. Whether you are looking for a new full time position or would prefer consulting assignments, you’ll need to have a clear direction and an execution strategy. Some of the tasks are to identify prospective companies and potential roles, make networking contacts within the companies, apply for positions, conduct company research and prepare for interviews.  And the list of potential activities goes on.

I found my local career center was a great resource for learning the “how to’s” for a job search in 2014, but that managing and executing the activities was a full time job in itself. A few months ago, I took training courses in two of the leading project management methodologies: PMP and SCRUM. PMP reviews the classic methodology for managing large complex projects and includes up to 49 different processes in the latest (5th) Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK). It’s very thorough and well regarded, but is really best for truly complex projects with lots of interactions between the steps. I also took a course in SCRUM, which is one of the Agile methodologies for managing projects. What’s the difference? SCRUM is much more lightweight, has fewer processes and is designed to enable very rapid responses to change.

A few weeks after taking the courses, I decide to put these skills to work. I looked at what I needed to do in my job search and decided that SCRUM was probably a better fit for the task than PMP. Why did I choose SCRUM?  First, I liked it’s lightweight approach. I already had a pretty clear idea on my goal — looking for a full-time position which used my product management, marketing or project management skills. I also had lots of potential tasks every week — identifying companies, networking, creating cover letters and tweaked resumes, making followup contacts and so on. Plus, depending upon what happened from week to week, I might need to change the emphasis — for example, to do company research for upcoming interviews and reduce the amount of prospecting for new companies. SCRUM also is useful for promoting action. I wanted to track my activities and be able to monitor progress with some visible metrics. With SCRUM, you can assess progress day by day and week by week.

If you’re in the process of making a change in your career, what approaches are you taking? Have you considered using project management methodologies such as SCRUM or PMP?  In my next post, I’ll talk about the steps I took to put SCRUM to work to help manage my job search.

James Rafferty has been active in the worlds of telecommunications, standards and university teaching in a variety of roles. He's been a thought leader in areas such as Voice over IP and Internet fax through his consulting, product management, marketing, writing and standards activities, and he is currently teaching business at Northeastern University. He loves to write and talk about new connections, applications and business models as communications, related technologies and business concepts evolve.

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