As a Higher Ed/Student Affairs professional considering project management, "do project managers coach" might be pretty high up on the list of things you've scrawled down into your notes app or onto your desktop pad, "saving for later".
After all, coaching and developing the people you work with (and maybe even managing up!) is probably one of the core skills that brought you to student affairs in the first place... so of course we want to highlight it in your pivot. It's truly a superpower!
The answer (as with so many questions about moving from student affairs to project management) is "yes... and".
While I've written before about how your experience supervising teams can translate into project management, we've never talked here about the role that coaching specifically plays. So let's clear up a few myths up front!
One of the trickiest things to understand about project management when you're new to the field is how to use your influence, generally. So often, project managers are responsible for the success of an entire project without actually having supervision authority over anyone on the team. While that can seem like a bit of a paradox, it also shows us why it's so important to understand the difference between peer coaching and supervision.
As a project manager, you're very often going to be providing feedback to the people you work with. Often, these will be the folks on your project team. You might be working with them on skills directly related to their subject expertise (for example, if a software engineer is constantly turning in code that doesn't run efficiently, you might refer them to a professional development program). More often, you're working with them on indirectly-related skills. In our software engineer example, you might be coaching them to balance their workload better, or to communicate more clearly when they're talking to external stakeholders.
If this feels intimidating to you, I'm going to challenge you (as usual) to think about how intimidating a position like an Academic Success Coach would be to someone who might not have set foot on a college campus in decades, and who might not have done well in school. What sorts of things might you imagine them saying to explain why they'd be bad at your job? "I can't do math." "Science freaks me out." "I could never write essays."
And then what sorts of things might you say in response? "Well, you don't really have to know calculus to do my job." (True.) "It's much more important to understand what motivates students, and then work with them to fan those flames." (Also true.)
Read that above paragraph back to me... and then reflect on the idea that students are just young adults who happen to be attending college, rather than working as software engineers. If you can do it with college students, you can do it with software engineers.
One of the most helpful things you can do for yourself as you prepare to transition into project management is to practice mentally decoupling supervision, or management, from coaching. If you're currently coaching your students from the mentality of "I am their boss so my job is to give them feedback", see if you can find ways to connect with them beyond that paradigm. Similarly, see if you can begin practicing providing feedback to peers, or even to your boss.
Frankly, by the way, this is an important skill no matter where you land. But for project managers, it's a non-negotiable. Giving feedback completely outside the dynamic of a supervisor/supervisee relationship is such a key part of the project manager role.
I actually didn't realize until I became a project manager how deeply I'd internalized that feedback was something that only flowed one way, from a supervisor to a supervisee. The first time I had to give feedback to a project team member who I didn't supervise (and a marketing manager, at that! so someone who "outranked" me!), it was terrifying. But the feedback (which, again, was about this person's relational skills... who am I to tell a marketer how to do marketing?) was necessary for the health of the project. I believe this person probably internalized it to grow as a professional... but again, I don't supervise them! So I'm not sure!
What mattered in that situation was:
Now, of course I provided that feedback in a way that allowed space for that team member to process and reflect on the learning. But I didn't make myself responsible for that processing, and I certainly didn't take on the mantle of helping them practice and demonstrate growth following the project ending, the way I would have when giving similar feedback to someone I directly supervised. That's the difference between the coaching I provide on projects and the feedback I provide as part of a supervisory relationship.