📈Business & Finance
Manager / Project Lead
Organizes people and processes toward a goal
Plans the team's work, assigns tasks and makes sure a project or department reaches its goal on time and within budget.
What they do
- ▹Builds a project plan: who does what, and by when
- ▹Runs stand-ups and syncs the work of different departments (sales, production, IT)
- ▹Tracks the project budget and flags it to leadership if it's slipping
- ▹Negotiates with contractors, suppliers and clients on the company's behalf
Skills you need
- ▹Planning and goal-setting (e.g. SMART goals)
- ▹Reading a project's financial indicators
- ▹Comfortable use of task trackers (Trello, Jira)
- ▹Negotiation and conflict resolution
- ▹Deciding with incomplete information
Focus on these subjects at school
MathematicsA foreign language
Where they work
- ▹Construction and manufacturing companies
- ▹IT companies and startups
- ▹Banks and telecom operators
- ▹International projects and NGOs
- ▹Sales and growth departments of any large business
Pros
- + Management experience is valued in every industry, from construction to IT
- + Pay and status grow with the scale of projects entrusted to you
Challenges
- − Accountable for a project's failure even when a team member made the mistake
- − Constant context-switching between tasks and people makes it hard to focus on one thing for long
Programs that lead to this profession
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