Reference no: EM133188226
It seemed like a good idea at the time. You followed the self-assessment steps recommended by the college's career counselling centre - determine your skills and interests, identify promising career fields based on that assessment, research organizations where you could do that type of work. The method was successful - an interest in organizing things and volunteer experience arranging golf fund raisers and gala dinners led you to pursue a career in event coordination for the city's tourism board. Or at least, the whole process should have been successful.
But here you are, two years later, sick to death of boarding airplanes on short notice and putting out countless last-minute fires at tourist promotion events from one side of the country to the other. You're not home enough, your diet is suffering from too much rich restaurant food, and switching among five time zones is not, in your view, a normal human activity. Back to the drawing board.
As you conduct your second self-assessment, you realize you still have a knack for organizing things and still like working with groups of people. It's mainly the travel and the minor crises caused by planning events from a distance that make your job so ill-suited for you.
You decide to follow another suggestion you remember from the college - arrange a series of information interviews to learn about the day-to-day realities of different jobs. Maybe if you'd done that in the first place, you would have steered clear of tourism promotion as a field for using your organizational skills.
Meg Howarth, a friend of one of the board members at the agency where you volunteer, is a project manager. She works at ITorg, a firm that develops and customizes software for large financial services clients. You met Meg once or twice and thought her job sounded interesting. She manages large projects, which can involve a hundred developers and run for a year or two, and makes sure the work is on track, on schedule and on budget. She's not a software developer herself, and doesn't need to be in order to do her job. Barring an unusual crisis, Meg stays in town and leaves client visits to the firm's account executives.
Deliverable:
a. A letter to Meg requesting an information interview to explore whether software project management might be a career choice that matches your skills and interests, and to find out what kind of background employers require
b. A list of five (5) questions designed to draw out the information you need during the information interview