English Major Turned… IT Project Manager?

I was 25 years old and working as an editorial assistant for Cambridge University Press. I had just completed my MFA in creative writing while working there full-time. I wanted to be a fiction editor, but upon entering the workforce in 2010, jobs were scarce, so instead I landed in the English Language Teaching division, and it was the best thing that could’ve happened.

One of my main responsibilities was to process invoices for freelancers. Like something out of 1995, we still did that work by hand until the Press finally decided to implement an invoicing system called SAP. The editorial assistants were the super users of that implementation. It did not go well. The project was poorly run and executed. As a result, we had weekly meetings with senior leadership to discuss both the system bugs and the issues with the process. In those meetings, I made my feelings known: the system doesn't work and we are wasting huge amounts of time looking for workarounds. Here's how we should do things differently.

The IT director was in those meetings, and I had gotten his attention. It turned out he had an IT project manager role to fill, and my approach had impressed him. He didn't care that I didn't have any technical or project management experience; he needed a doer. He poached me for that position and gave me a $20k raise.

I got my project management certification (PMP) and was immediately tasked with creating the Press’s first ever online adaptive learning platform. I was responsible for a cross-functional international team, managing two vendors, and creating a new product from scratch. I was terrified. Suddenly, I was not an assistant to someone else but instead owned the outcome of a project. But I figured it out, as I always do, and we launched the site on-time and under budget. This took my career in an entirely new direction and I haven't looked back.