Transitioned/ing Military and PMP

As a military member, you do lots of things. You are told to do something, and you just get it done. That's what we do. For example, being in the Navy, one of our owned spaces was the missile deck on a Destroyer. We were tasked with painting it. As the guy in charge of three sailors, I set out tasks for all three. These tasks encompassed everything. We checked the weather to see if it was raining. The ship's schedule to see how fast we were traveling. Gathering material like paint brushes, rollers, tape, pans, etc. Ensuring that there was the correct paint on board in the right quantities. Who was going to paint what, and then what day I would come back and make sure things were done the way they needed to be done. At the end of all this, our portion of the ship was painted and we could move on to other things (like playing video games). What I didn't know until it was explained to me was that..

I had just led a project, and had Project Manager Experience!

This blew my mind. All this time I thought I had no experience that I could transfer to the real world when I got out. But no, I had successfully planned a project to include logistics, schedule, scope, people, quality assurance, and closing the project as I reported the results to my chain of command.

We don't realize this, but we as military members have more experience than most people do after 10 years at any job. Sure, it may not be the field that you want, like in my case, but you can use that experience to help you leverage your way to any job.

I used this aha moment to earn my Project Management Professional (PMP) and Professional Scrum Master I (PSM) Certifications. Using things like planning for deployments, painting the ship, upgrading software systems, preparing for ship certifications, I found that I had plenty of experience.

Searching for ways to study for PMP, I came across Onward 2 Opportunity. If you are in your last 6 months in the military, are already out, or are a spouse of a military member, you can apply to this program. It provides free training and certification exam through Syracuse University for a number of HR and IT programs. For PMP, they also pay for a 1 year membership to the Project Management Institute.

In all my studying, which took about 2 months, I found that in the military, we do everything that Project Managers do, it's just not formalized. We don't call the phases:

Initializing
Planning
Executing
Monitoring/Controlling
Closing.

We called it:

We have to do this
Let's do it
We're working on it
Looking Good
We're Done

Changing the way I thought of things, helped me to better understand everything I was studying.

Once I passed my PMP Exam, I knew I wanted to get into the IT realm. I heard that Scrum Master is the Project Manager of the IT world. So I began studying and found that they are very similar, except things are done in increments vice whole projects. There are other small differences, but after studying for 1 week, I took and passed the PSM exam.

Being in the military has given you many different experiences. You need to find out how to leverage that experience for the "real" world. How you word things is a big factor in doing that leverage as I wrote above. Below are some of the resources I used to study for the PMP Exam.

https://edward-designer.com/web/list-of-free-pmp-exam-questions/

https://www.oliverlehmann.com/pmp-self-test/100-free-questions.htm

https://www.oliverlehmann.com/contents/free-downloads/200_PMP_Sample_Questions.pdf

https://www.simplilearn.com/pmp-exam-prep-free-practice-test?source=PracticeTestCTA

https://www.edwel.com/Free-Resources/PMP-Certification-Practice-Exam.aspx

https://www.greycampus.com/opencampus/project-management-professional/practise-exams

https://www.whizlabs.com/project-management-professional-pmp/

https://www.pm-exam-simulator.com/pmp-exam-simulator/free-pmp-exam-simulator