Spotlight on Transferable Skills | Shannen Mckillop, HSBC UK
From PA to Project Manager
After a brief time in the events industry, a recruiter approached me regarding an assistant position for a local IT start-up. At first a temporary role, I stuck with the company for a couple of years before moving on to other PA opportunities. Working as a personal assistant is an often underrated and misunderstood role. Professionalism, building trusting relationships and adaptability are all integral to the role. As an assistant you need to be an extremely organised individual – not just for yourself but all the others around you. The tasks are many, varied and often last minute! In a typical day I would engage with many stakeholders: senior, internal, clients.
Before HSBC, my last temp position had been a PA at an investment firm. This gave me some basic understanding of the financial industry, and it was this exposure alongside my transferable skills that led to my first PA role at HSBC.
As I got to know our business, and the work of teams around me, my interest in taking the leap to project manager grew. There are many synergies between the roles – stakeholder communication, organisation, flexibility. Being able to identify and articulate these core strengths was key to my advancement in the industry. I was lucky enough that my director strongly supported my career development journey, and I also engaged valuable mentors – successful project managers who showed me how a project runs at HSBC, our key docs and planning tools and, most importantly, who gave me a chance to be hands-on in their own projects.
After two and a half years with HSBC and around six months dual-role between PA and PM activities, I got my start as a project manager. A role I enjoy and thrive in, I have now moved into a senior position to lead and develop others in the project governance space – encouraging others to hone their own core skills. Management brings its own, new challenges, but I see opportunity to develop additional transferable skills that will continue to be useful for the future. I now have exposure to recruitment in this role, and from this experience I would strongly encourage hiring managers to take a chance on applicants who don't necessarily have a financial background if their other attributes suit the role. We, as hiring managers, are in many ways the gatekeepers into the industry, and, through a focus on transferable skills, we have a chance to encourage others to join the sector, but also give our organisations the diversity of thought and experience that will future-proof the industry.