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How can an operations manager break into tech?
I'm a few years out of college and just landed my first "career" job last fall as an operations manager at a non-tech company. I enjoy the work and am learning a lot, but the work/life balance leaves a bit to be desired with very limited PTO days. My girlfriend and I want to move to the Denver area about a year from now and I want to try to get a job in the tech industry doing operations or project management.
Have any of you been in my position before? What kind of jobs can someone with about 2 years of operations management experience find to get them on the project manager track at a tech company?
I haven't been in your position, but I've worked in operations at tech companies for the past decade. If I were you, I would start by getting your foot in the door at a tech company with an operations role, since your general operations experience should be fairly applicable. I say that because you do not need to have technical knowledge to do operations at a tech company, but you should have at least a basic understanding of technology to do project management in tech. Once you are in, you can get acclimated to the tech industry and see if you want to pivot to project management from there, maybe even get the company to pay for some PM education/certification.
I love working in operations/legal at tech companies personally, but project management does provide a wider scope of opportunities, and PM certifications are seen as being valuable for an extremely large variety of roles outside of actually being a PM, including operations roles. Essentially, exploring the PM track makes a lot of sense, and even if you don't end up as a PM, you'll likely benefit from the experience regardless.
Yeah, looking at that, those jobs do seem to apply to my experience more than project manager positions. I have a bit of technical knowledge; I took an assembly language class in college, was in the IT club in high school, and have messed around with coding before. I am in no way knowledgeable enough to actually do technical work, but I can understand technical concepts and read code others wrote if the comments are decent.
Thanks for the help!
I moved from a technical to managerial role last year and these would be my takeaways:
Do you have any technical skills? It's not required, but at least having an aptitude for it will go a long way. The idea is that you may not be able to do the work, but you can understand it and trust in your staff (or project members) to do their jobs.
Where you could be a huge help is leveraging soft skills for the technical folks with communications, organization, accountability, etc.
For Project Mgmt you could look at some real entry level certifications like the CompTIA Project+, or something general purpose from PMI
I went from being a PM in IT at a manufacturing company (3ish years) to being a PM for a small software development agency (1 year). I earned my PMP about 1.5 years ago and have a few agile certs, I tinker with self-hosting in my free time, I have a minor background in comp Sci (enough to be able to talk pseudo code with devs and do minor scripting), and a little background in data analysis (enough to be able to query a DB with SQL).
There has definitely been a learning curve to understand when I should step in to prevent someone from going into an unnecessary tech hole but otherwise all my skills were pretty easily transferable. Best part has been dedicated project teams so you're not having to fight for someone's time vs their day job. LMK if you have any more questions.