Bridging the Gap: How to get from Here to There
/So, I've set my sights on a discipline to pursue: I am targeting a Project Management role at a Digital Agency or Design firm. I spent a lot of effort evaluating the design industry and it was important to determine what experience/skills I already have and how I could strategically leverage my ability to make a move. This is an important exercise because it helps inform the types and kinds of steps that I may need to take to “bridge the gap” so to speak - The “gap” being industry specific hard knowledge and experience.
Supplementing the experience I already have with skills and experience I may need to excel in my next career is a complicated and lengthy phase and I will discuss pieces of it at a time in upcoming posts, but in general, my thought process went something like this:
- I took time to think about and diagram out my work experience and skills.
- I researched Project Management and other similar roles in the digital and design world to get a top level understanding of what is required to be successful (ongoing).
- I compared the outputs from steps 1 and 2 to determine what I was missing (ongoing).
- I set out to bridge that knowledge and experience gap (ongoing).
At the moment I’m heavily involved in finding the experience and hard knowledge/skills I need to succeed in the design world and I will detail the work I have been doing. Some topics you can expect are those on education, independent research, industry meetings/talks, informational interviews and more.