Curious about a career in scheduling

Dear Alex,

Finding a job after graduation is done usually in many ways. Several factors come into pay; Your GPA, personality, family and friends connections, summer internships, references, looks for ads in the right place, career fairs, etc.

Since you are in finance and worked on P6, you might be able to work at a bank’s credit department. Banks finance projects, and they keep a very close eyes on the progress throughout the project cycle.

I think that if you work with a good teacher or two on a good size project, then you can build your resume on that experience. Check with the seniors who graduated in the years before and where they have found jobs as well.

The first step is to identify the industry that you want to work in, check who is hiring and find out what they are looking for in the trade magazines.

Good luck and congradualations on your graduation in advance.

With kind regards,

Samer

Thank you for he kind words Samer. I wanted to work in energy but you brought up a good point about banking. I did not know that banks did a lot with scheduling. To my knowledge my school has no project management courses and I have not heard of Any scheduling related courses unfortunately. I will keep my eye open and talkto career services.

Thank you for giving me somewhere to start.

Hi Alex,
we have some banks among our customers and usually they use scheduling for tracking the projects where they loaned money and for management of their internal projects like new information system implementation, development of new bank products, etc.
Unfortunately not many banks have mature PM Systems and this is both Threat and Opportunity for you. Threat because it is not easy to find the bank that is serious about project management and Opportunity because you can produce visible benefits applying project management methods and tools to the bank activities.
To use Opportunity you need not only scheduling skills but first of all project management skills. So don’t forget to study project management. The scheduling helps to manage resources properly but without proper management it will not work.
Best Regards,
Vladimir

Hi Alex - Welcome to PP

If you can work the software then you can call yourself a scheduler.

This is the bottom rung of the ladder - search the term "keyboard jockey" on the forum and you will get an idea of what is involved - the little ginger headed guy on the banner is typical.

As a scheduler you will be working on other peoples plans.

These other people are senior project managers who know how to build things because they have been doing it for years.

They use schedulers to work the software because:

a) They can’t use it themselves
b) It is better use of their time to employ a low grade scheduler to do the boring bits.

During your time as a scheduler you should get as much on-site time as possible - watch listen and learn about the construction process and keep asking questions.

When you have some understanding of the process then maybe you can start producing your own plans on simple projects - whereupon you may call yourself a planner.

You will see in this forum many examples of schedulers who are working out of their experience and trying to be planners.

As for a chosen industry - I would suggest Mechanical & Electrical Engineering because:

1. It is the simplest of disciplines to schedule.
2. Very few planners work in this field.

Good luck in your career whichever route you take.

Best regards

Mike Testro

Mike,

Thank you for breaking down the differences for me, that really filled out the gray areas. I will keep searching for entry level jobs, for data entry. I am totally happy with that because, like you said, it will give me a foot in to understanding the overall process.

Vladimir,

I figured that is what the banks would use it for because we have been talking a lot about the banking system and it makes total sense that they would do that to follow large loan projects. Would it be more common for large consolidated banks like Citigroup and J.P. Morgan-Chase or in medium regional banks?

Thank you guys for hasty replies and thank you for the site with such information.

Dear Alex,

Start with bank that have deposits of 1 Billion. The amount they lend would be around 300-400 millions. That may be divided into small, medium and large projects.

The bigger the banks, the more likely that they have the requirement to invest in a proper planning department.

With kind regards,

Samer

Don’t rule out REITs or any Corporation involved in medium or large scale Real Estate Development, even Residential Development.

http://web.mit.edu/cre/research/pdf/wheaton-nechayev_sleeping-giant_12-29-09.pdf

Few Scheduling software have the capacity to include financial constraints and metrics such as limited cash flow, ROI and NPV, search for the appropriate tool that will provide you with the metrics you need. Spider Project is the only tool comes to my mind that have all these.

Merely tracking would bore me, scheduling is not just about tracking; the joy is in the process of investment analysis and managerial decisions once your jobs are running.