A career as a project manager requires a variety of skills
and experience, and you can enter
the industry in many different ways. For Chloe French, Associate Director
at Faithful+Gould, the pathway into project management was not the typical one
– in fact, some could say it was rocky. That’s because Chloe moved into project
management after an extensive geology career. She spoke to us about her change
of profession, what it takes to be a great project manager and why she loves
what she does:
“I started out in ground engineering then spent 14
years working in the UK and overseas on multi-disciplinary projects”
A chartered geologist by trade, Chloe started her career
working in ground investigation, using ground investigation data to inform
civil engineering design. This extended into multidisciplinary design bigger
and bigger civil engineering projects. Chloe’s work history includes spending
more than two years working on a parallel oil and gas line in Russia, as well
as working on mining infrastructure in Australia. These experiences helped to
shape her professional career, exposing her to relationships with clients,
stakeholders and contractors with different backgrounds, cultures and working
styles. The communication and stakeholder management involved in these more
client-facing roles gave Chloe a taste of project management, and she became
increasingly passionate about business development, stakeholder management and
team building – all of which are major parts of a project manager’s role. She
increasingly found herself drawn to planning and executive delivery and
empowering teams to achieve delivery of projects, making her a perfect fit for
project management.
After returning to the UK just over five years ago, Chloe
took up a role at Atkins working in ground engineering before transferring to
Faithful+Gould to pursue her project management dream.
“My technical background gives me an advantage when
dealing with clients and contractors”
Chloe’s technical experience and methodical approach to
tackling projects have helped her transition into the project management space,
where she can speak the technical language of her clients and really get to
grips with processes and requirements. She’s had the opportunity to build up
her part of the business and develop relationships, picking up new contracts
and ensuring her team can not only deliver projects successfully, but really
understand what it is their clients want. Her ability to translate technical
jargon into simplified explanations is a key component of Chloe’s role, and she
believes her ground engineering experience has been instrumental in her success
as a project manager.
Working alongside other disciplines as a geologist has
helped Chloe to gain a broad overview of the project lifecycle and how
different disciplines work together. “It’s rare in ground engineering to ever
purely work on ground engineering projects, and you’re always interacting with
other infrastructure,” she says. The ability to work as a team is also a bonus,
and Chloe says her colleagues at Faithful+Gould and the wider SNC-Lavalin Group are part of what makes her job so
enjoyable.
“A good project manager is genuinely passionate about
the project”
Regardless of the discipline and industry you’re working in,
Chloe believes that you need to be genuinely interested in the projects you’re
working on. While you won’t be doing the technical work yourself – producing
drawings, creating specifications or performing construction tasks – you need
to take an interest in it and understand how it fits into the wider project
puzzle. Chloe believes that the best project managers may have pure project
management training and experience, but will combine this with a curiosity
about the projects they’re working on, asking questions of project engineers
and contractors to help inform the conversations they go on to have with
clients and stakeholders. In addition, Chloe believes a practical, logical and
structured approach to work is instrumental to her success as a project manager.
She loves being able to track a project at every step, marking key milestones
and ensuring the whole process runs smoothly. Clear, consistent communication
is key for this, and Chloe points to her background working in different
countries alongside different working styles as being integral to this element
of her job now.
Are you interested in a career in project management?
Chloe’s journey to a project management career is just one
of the many different pathways you can take. There are different qualifications
and methodologies that can help in the industry, including APM, PRINCE2, Six
Sigma, Lean and Agile, and some project managers working in construction have
qualifications in construction and the built environment. A degree or
postgraduate degree can be preferred but isn’t strictly necessary, with some
project managers working their way up from a support role or junior project
manager position.
If you’re looking for your next career
step in project management, Faithful+Gould can help. View our latest project manager
jobs here to get started.
