I seem to recall posting at the beginning of the year how I was looking forward to slowing down and focusing on home and family for awhile.
The universe was listening, though not the way I expected. After taking a big swig from her cup, she rather loudly yelled “HOLD MY BEER!”, and I found myself suddenly laid off from my job of 3 1/2 years via a departmental restructure. I’ve never been laid off before, so it took a minute to wrap my head around the new reality – I do not have a job, I do have a severance package, I can file for unemployment, and suddenly I have a LOT of time on my hands.
Thankfully something else I have is an amazing husband. As soon as he made sure I was ok (I was), he got right on his beloved Excel sheet that handles the budget forecasting and started updating. Within an hour or two he was able to take a lunch break and show me where he had changed up some priorities, but over all, this wasn’t a crisis. Tighter budget, less discretionary spending, but overall we were ok, and this wasn’t going to break us, even if I was out of work for awhile. He told me to relax and take a day or two to process, that we had some breathing room. I couldn’t do that.
For the rest of the day I researched and considered and weighed my options. The obvious answer was to immediately update my resume to look for a new job, but I couldn’t ignore the feeling that this was meant to be more than just a tiny hiatus between positions – it was the chance to get myself in a better position and come back stronger. I talked to Joseph about the direction my thoughts were taking me, and he recognized the value of what I wanted to do, even though it would mean not job hunting right away; it was a time investment that should pay off.
Like so many my career has been built on my own learning and experience; I never got a degree, and that hasn’t been a big regret. It is the reality though that a piece of paper can help get your foot in the door, and the PMP certification for project management is one of those that does. I’ve started and stopped the process a couple of times over the years, but it’s a difficult exam that takes a ton of study, and the bandwidth hasn’t been there to follow through. Finding myself with nothing but time, this was a no-brainer. I was excited at this plan that was coming together so easily on day 1.
The universe, having the wicked sense of humor she does, felt I needed a little humbling, and the next day when going down to do some laundry, I slipped and fell down the stairs. Thankfully I was more bruised than injured with just a wrenched shoulder, but it did make me slow down and take a couple of days off like Joseph had advised the day before. (I’m not admitting he was right, but the possibility is there.)
In that downtime I had started deep-diving into study materials and such for the PMP exam, and realized Agile is a big part of the curriculum due to how widely it’s used now. I’d been curious about it because it strikes me as the rebellious teenage sister of traditional software development and project management. If I had to learn Agile for the PMP anyways, why not get Scrum Master certification along the way? Level 2 is just showing you can apply the principles of level 1, so going straight for PSM 2 certification was added to my to-do list. I’m not sure I’d ever use it, but it wouldn’t hurt to have. And since I’m going to be doing all this learning, might as well drill down on some focus areas – AI, leadership skills, risk management, reporting and budgets, tools like Jira and Trello…you get the picture. Using every tool at my disposal I put together a self-study curriculum to help me address knowledge gaps, develop the discipline from learning the frameworks, and finally understand the key difference between being a project manager and a project leader. I didn’t plan to become a full-time student, but here we are.
By the end of Friday I hope to get the PMP exam application submitted. Approval takes up to a week.
This week I’ll take the PSM 2 exam.
~4 weeks of study and I’ll take the PMP exam.
No biggie right? I got this. I think.
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