This post takes it real nuts and bolts: what types of things do project managers actually do? Spoiler alert: as a higher ed/student affairs professional, you're already doing a lot of it. (All spoilers should be so good, right?)
This post dovetails with my What is a project manager? post - but today we're getting even more detailed. I recommend you save this post and come back to it frequently if you're new to project management - at the risk of tooting my own air horn, this is a pretty comprehensive breakdown that I wrote because I hadn't seen something similar for HESA work mapped to PM. I hope it's helpful!
This is a very high-level, but more or less complete, list of the types of work a project manager does over the life of a project. I've attempted to break out the types of work alongside the types of functional areas you're likely to see in job postings - and I've also included examples of similar work you might have already done in higher education!
Stakeholder work: engaging with individuals and organizations inside and outside of your own team. Building positive relationships with them by delivering a high-quality project outcome informed by a nuanced understanding of what constitutes success for each type of stakeholder.
Any time you're interacting with folks outside your own team in higher ed, this is stakeholder work. Have you worked with parents & families? Community members? Government relations? These are slam dunk stakeholder relationships for any entry-level interview. If not, what are examples of times you've served on committees or work groups and moved work forward?
Team performance: motivating and developing your team - even when you are not their direct boss - to form a commitment to project excellence and deliver quality results.
Lean heavily on your relationships with students here - both those you've supervised and others.
Project planning: understanding and articulating the resources needed to deliver the project (budget + human capital), and the time it takes to do so (schedule). Often the resources/schedule tension is a push/pull - if you can give the project more money, you can often get it done a bit sooner, but often the project manager's job involves deciding where you might need to pull a bit of slack. (Think back to the phrase about how "you can have it fast, cheap, or good - pick two".)
Project execution: tracking against budget and schedule once the project is underway, and reporting as-needed throughout. Sometimes this is a regularly-scheduled update, and sometimes it's raising a red flag as things go wrong (see below).
The above two (planning and execution) are really the heart of any program coordinator work. For example, I came from student activities, so every time I brought a speaker to campus or planned an involvement fair, those moving parts would fall under project planning and execution.
Knowledge management: tracking "lessons learned" throughout the project, and making sure these lessons are logged in a way that will be accessible for future projects (whether or not they are managed by you). This may also involve facilitating an official project closing meeting with members of the project team and/or stakeholders, depending on the scale of the project.
You have a couple options here. Internally, think about times you've been the one to keep your team on track by keeping them organized using some kind of system. File management systems (e.g. Google Drive, shared drives), task management systems (e.g. Asana, Monday), CRMs (e.g. Salesforce), and more all count here. Externally, think of times you've been responsible for documenting lessons learned.
Risk (planning & mitigation/response): the every-project piece is understanding what might go wrong, and coming up with a plan pro-actively about what will happen if it does. The "hopefully not-that-often" piece is engaging that plan when something does go wrong. This could be anything from "a project member gets sick" to "the market totally flips and our product environment is ousted".
If you're in higher ed, you've almost certainly managed risk. This could be anything from creating rain plans for events to serving on a crisis management/behavioral intervention team. Think about times you've been responsible for thinking through all the potential outcomes from a situation, and understanding how you'd minimize harm to everyone involved if a negative outcome came to pass - and then, critically, communicating those plans to everyone else on the team.
Reporting: Once the project is done, who hears about it and how? A project manager's job is to make sure that 1) the project results are reported externally, to anyone who might be interested, and 2) any learnings that came up in the course of the work are recorded so that future teams can use them later (see knowledge management section).
Assessment projects are a slam dunk here. Certainly if you've ever been responsible for undertaking an assessment effort on your own, that goes here.
One of the awesome things about planning to pivot into formal project management from higher education/student affairs is that practicing the skills that will make you a great project manager will also make you a better HESA practitioner along the way. If you're reading the above list and thinking that you don't have any examples of that work... well, first, please get in touch with me because I'm not sure that's true. Second, there are probably changes you can make this semester that will help prepare you.
Are you currently using a project management platform with your team? Systems like Asana and Trello are free, and are a great way to practice PM skills (and develop your own style).