About 1 month ago, I was
offered an amazing opportunity to work as a digital project manager for a
fantastic, modern digital marketing company in a beautiful office in wonderful
Nyack, right by the water. My interest in project management began before I
even fuller understood what project management was. I had attended the Purchase
College conservatory of music for Jazz performance with a focus on guitar from
2006-2010, and almost immediately started creating and selling music - both
digital and physical - across many platforms; communicating between designers,
screen printers, and fulfillment centers; utilizing social media, including
creating high-quality videos that could be shared; playing shows and touring,
selling stickers, T-shirts, meet-the-band packages. We even created fun,
engaging games and contests on social media like, "Whoever can pick the
name of our new tour van gets a pizza delivered to their house", and
"What should we write on the tour bus today?" (we had magnetic
letters just for this occasion). I loved doing things. I loved making things
happen. And when they didn't happen the way I wanted them to, I loved figuring
out why: debriefing with my group, seeing what we did wrong, and figuring out
what we could do better next time. In 2013, we had made it to Europe, touring
with a driver, staying in nice hotels. At the end of the day, however, there
still wasn't much to take home, and unfortunately, in that business, that
seemed to be the trend almost everywhere.
I knew I had an interest in marketing, branding, advertising, and managing, so when I saw the Marketing Communication Management program offered at Manhattanville College, I knew it would be a perfect fit. I decided to pursue the program and see what else I can learn about the non-musical aspects of running a band (which is actually about 90% of the job), or any business, and to create some opportunities to hopefully do this for others some day, music related or not. I am fortunate enough to have a lot of friends in marketing, web development, IT, and project management, so learning some basics came easily and I was even able to gain some experience by lending a hand as a remote project manager to a very successful friend who runs his own digital agency in London (we met through him coming to me for online guitar lessons. Quick Tip: a huge portion of the project management, development, and IT field is made up musicians and artists). Although this was great, real-life experience, I felt I was lacking a foundation; the skills, tools, and various methodologies required to be a great project manager. The basics could only get me so far, so I decided to register for Don Genio's project management course.
I can
confidently say that if it were not for this course, I do not believe I would
have been offered the position I am currently working in now. I learned ways to
better coordinate projects for both single-function and cross-functional teams.
I learned about many different tools that could be used to deliver projects and
products on-time and on-budget, set realistic schedules for multiple,
simultaneous projects, and how to gather, organize, and prioritize objectives.
Don's course inspired me so much that I even registered for a 2 day
certification course in a specific agile project management framework known as
Scrum (if you're interested in project management, look into this as it is the
leading, modern PM framework being used by more and more companies everyday). His
material was always organized and taught in a way that made it easy to
understand. More importantly, the course motivated me to dig deeper into the
subject on my own time. Don treats his students like colleagues. He will go the
extra mile to make sure everything is understood, not just in theory, but in
practice, and because of that I am working today as a Digital Project Manager
at the integrated digital marketing agency, Liqui-Site, in Nyack. As an
instructor, Don is second to none and I would highly recommend his courses to
anyone with no hesitation, as I would certainly study with him again. In
the past month I've delivered projects in the education, healthcare,
non-profit, and entertainment arenas consisting of marketing campaigns using
the latest software and analytics tools in digital marketing; web, ad, print
creative/design; websites from small, five page micro-sites to full scale,
responsive web designed ecommerce stores integrated with content management
systems. I speak with content strategists, SEO specialists, designers, and full
stack developers everyday; the list goes on. Nothing is stale in this business
and there's always surprises. The best part is, you're surrounded by incredibly
smart people. There's no reason for me to dread work in the mornings and I'm
very excited to see what comes next.
Please don't hesitate to reach
out to me with any questions if you're interested in getting involved in this
type of work. It's very rewarding, requires both creativity and critical
thinking, and technical knowledge as well as interpersonal skills. The
profession is in demand due to the huge amount of tech startups, marketing (and
just about everything) being completely digital, big data, and the massive
amount of new software and 3rd party applications and plug-ins that exist for
each one of those pieces of software. If you're the kind of person that enjoys
seeing progress, being a part of that progress, and making things happen,
project management in any field might be the career for you.
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