This is a centralized "how to prepare for a PM job interview" post… since many of you will be using these resources to drive toward this topic 🙂

The Project Management Life Cycle

First things first, my advice is going to be to peel apart the project management life cycle and map your own experience to it. Remember that in the PM Life Cycle, we're talking about five stages:

• Initiation: big-picture strategy, answering the "why are we undertaking this project" questions
• Planning: setting the stage for execution work, answering the "how are we going to get this done" questions ("who will do what by when" framework)
• Executing: Completing the "who will do what by when" framework we set out above
• Monitoring & Controlling: Ensuring that everything is going according to plan, and stepping in (as proactively as we can) when it isn't
• Closing: Reporting out, transferring knowledge... the work of "zipping the project up"

(This is an incredibly "zoomed out" view of the PM Life Cycle, but it's good enough to get us started. For a much more in-depth view, my Aspiring Project Manager course breaks down all of these stages into much greater detail, complete with examples from higher education work.)

So, to begin, take a close look at the above. For each stage, where can you pull examples of you having done this work? The strongest examples possible will be times that you led (not just contributed to) that work, and it resulted in meeting or exceeding the project objectives.

That said, we don't always have strong examples of each phase! It's totally normal and okay to have great examples from, say, executing, but to have "okay" examples from initiating. The trick here is to 1) show awareness of this and 2) talk up how excited you are to grow in that area and what your specific plans are for doing so.

Stakeholder Management

Once you've peeled apart the project life cycle, let's focus on stakeholder management. Here, we're looking for examples of times you've worked with diverse populations related to a project (remember that stakeholders can be internal or external to the organization!).

Your outstanding examples here are going to fall into one of two camps:

1. Anytime you were able to make headway where someone else couldn't with a tricky stakeholder. Maybe they're resistant; maybe they're lovely but it's a super complicated organizational structure; maybe no relationship previously existed at all. Whatever it is, if you were able to grow something through your relational skills, that's a great example.
2. Anytime you were able to use stakeholder relationship skills to go above and beyond and deliver a truly outstanding project. Example: maybe you worked with a stakeholder to hear something that no one else had heard before and uncover a business problem that you then solved.

Obviously, a truly slam-dunk answer would combine the above. That said, I think I have maybe two examples that do this. If you don't have one yet, don't stress.

Scope (including our bffs Budget & Schedule)

Finally, you're going to want to be able to speak to how you "manage scope". If you're new to project management this might sound a little like Greek. The trick here is that you can think of "managing scope" as a tool to stay within budget and on schedule.

"Scope" is basically "the pre-defined list of things we have to achieve as part of this project, based on the strategy we set at the beginning". And one super important takeaway that sounds simple, but is actually at the heart of project management: we define scope really well at the beginning so that we can say, throughout the rest of the project, that whatever isn't specifically in scope is out of scope.