project manager/carpentry

I was an executive at a small home building company and the world really needs more good carpenters. Sounds like you! If you want to do project management, and presuming you want to combine the two, here's what I'd do. Find some type of an entry level job involving carpentry mainly to gain experience; might not pay a ton at first. You need to learn the trade and also learn anything you can about project management there. Then with some minor experience and your carpentry training complete then I'd seek the best job I could find at the moment in the broad carpentry field. And at that company I'd do the best job I could and ask all kinds of questions about project management. Tell them that's why you are doing it; you want to get into that line of work. Concurrently, seek out an appropriate project management online training certification program or take a couple courses on the topic at a community college. Then see if you can wrangle a position at your current firm doing more project management, or alternatively start looking for a new job that will. That would be one way to go at it. Good luck my friend.

Hi Klein, I have a similar story I was in a technical job and then interested on Project Management so I switch roles two years ago. Definitely you best advantage will be that you know all the on field aspects and that will make easier for you estimations of resources, manage of the team. Of course you will have to learn new aspects so I would recommend start looking for information online. The project management institute offers a lot of material on this and maybe you can find something for free. If you are already working on some company where you can make this change of role I would talk with my direct manager so it´s aware of my interest and look if you can do some shadowing activities with people already in PM that could help.