Which track would you choose if you were in my position?
1. Get PMP Certified 2. Get Scrum Certified 3. Get PM Role
or
1. Get AWS Architect Certified. 2. Finish AI Nano Degree in Udacity. 3. Finish Machine Learning Engineer Nano Degree. 4. Get AI Engineer Role.
1) As an engineer, your technical skills are more rewarded and valued. You can quickly learn new skills like AI/Machine learning and will boost your career.
2) There is no guarantee that moving to PM role will boost your career. I feel PM skills are overrated and your success doesn't necessarily depends on your skills. Organizational dynamics & politics will also play a major role. In the few years that you will spend as PM, you will loose your technical skills and moving into a new domain will be a big challenge.
I personally choose to stay in engineering & learn AI/Machine learning and moving up the engineering ladder.
Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. > http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...
There are lots of AWS guys, lots of generalist PMP's. Not many AI engineers with PMP. *Reference Linkedin.
Also Cal Newport, MIT computer scientist, says a similar thing - do things that are rare and valuable, which he calls "career capital". I'd recommend the book, So Good They Can't Ignore you.
Every company I have worked at has been very appreciative of my communication skills and my focus on operations. So I was evaluating product management as a serious choice - as a PM who could also code reasonably well.
These were the questions I asked myself -
1. Is the new career going to give more control over my time or less (courtesy: Scott Adams's advice in his book)
With PM, I have noticed that your schedule is controlled by the customers you talk to and the deluge of meetings either with engineering stakeholders or the sales/marketing parts of the company
By continuing as an engineer, you get to dictate your hours to a large extent. There are still those meetings that you don't like, standups where people drone endlessly, but you can control most of the time and how it gets spent.
I have also noticed that people tend to forgive you if you don't want to/ care about socializing. They chalk it up to the engineer stereotype and let you be.
2. Are my skills transferable?
As an engineer, if you care about honing your skills and learning all the time, you'll do well. Mostly have transferable skills that you can take to other jobs
As a PM, this is not entirely true. Say you specialize in medical devices, you are unlikely to get hired by a ride sharing service. The vast domain knowledge you might have built about the market for medical devices might not be useful for ride sharing. Even though engineering problems tend to be similar (scaling, availability), it is not a guarantee.
So I decided to stick to being an engineer while also trying to be someone that is more empathetic to the product org. I will make a genuine effort to slip into the customer's shoes, think from the product perspective regardless of how cliched it sounds when I say that :)