By Aurelie Gandilhon
Editors Note: Translated from French
If the following list does not phase you, you might be this industry’s next great International Project Manager! I have been working internationally for a number of years and I have learned that these are the skills required to manage this lifestyle. Check them out and see if this is the life for you!
- Negotiating your own contract as well as you can with your future bookers and partners.
- Relentlessly boarding planes, day after day.
- Making sure that your passport is always on you and as far as possible from its expiration date.
- Knowing your new project inside out and remembering every detail of it in a matter of hours or of a few days.
- Assessing a project’s technical, logistical, financial and human needs.
- Being as productive at sunrise as at nightfall.
- Functioning with only a few hours of sleep.
- Managing both your stress and others’.
- Stepping back when faced with a difficult situation or other complication that compromises your schedule.
- Finding quick and efficient solutions regardless of the country and conditions you are in.
- Having and maintaining a good survival instinct.
- Working with a variety of foreign accents and languages.
- Asking for and getting the right helpers.
- Being beyond diplomatic with your colleagues.
- Keeping discouragement and momentary loss of motivation out of the workplace.
- Nothing more than a few sporadic minutes to talk to your family per day.
- Eating whatever and whenever you can.
- Constant changes in habits.
- Having a smile on your face at all times, regardless of how tired you might be.
- Spending long hours sitting in international meetings.
- Being unable to say “yes” all the time.
- Wearing security shoes, a construction helmet and a yellow jacket that will ruin your look… Forever!
- Kissing that libido goodbye.
- Working in the dust.
- A taxi ride in the deepest corner of the darkest woods to find a shop that can fix that one prop.
Only a true Project Manager at heart and soul will not let this list phase them. Come join us!
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