Episode 179 – Love Project Management – Come as You Are! 

The podcast by project managers for project managers.  Ren Love is the newest member of our Velociteach team and the Manager of Curriculum Development. Hear about her unique management experiences as she talks about leadership, interviewing, the PMP exam, and coping with testing anxiety. Table of Contents  02:19 … Meet Ren02:53 … Ren’s Project Management Journey06:20 … Memorable Success at Projects10:16 … Mammals and COVID11:34 … Preparing for Leadership14:08 … Routes to Project Management16:31 … Leadership Styles for PMs18:16 … Interviewing Tips19:58 … Be Confident in what You Know22:41 … Encouragement to New PMs24:37 … Ren’s Advice Wish List26:03 … Kevin and Kyle27:11 … When the Job is Different to the PMP Training30:35 … Common Questions about the PMP Exam31:54 … Overcoming Exam Anxiety34:47 … Contact Ren35:56 … Closing REN LOVE: ...be confident in what you know, and confident in how you’ll grow.  You don’t have to know everything about everything.  A well-rounded project manager is a lifelong learner.  ...Be confident that your past life experiences have made you who you are and will make you good at project management in the situation you’re in. And then also be prepared to say, there are things that I’m going to grow, and in this company.  What kind of opportunities can your company offer me to help me grow?  WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We’re so excited that you’re joining us, and we want to say thank you to our listeners who reach out to us and leave comments on our website or on social media.  We love hearing from you, and we always appreciate your positive ratings.  You will also earn PDUs for listening to this podcast.  Just listen up at the end, and we’ll give you instructions on how to claim your PDUs from PMI. Today we’re talking to one of our co-workers.  Her name is Ren Love, and Ren has a very interesting educational background which is almost as diverse as her professional one.  She has done many, many things in her exciting career before joining us at Velociteach.  She has a B.S. in Environmental Science, she has an M.S. in Biology and an M.S. in Instructional Design and Learning Technologies.  And she has worked in zoos, science centers, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, as well as one of the Big Four accounting firms.  So she’s really had fingers in the pie all over the place, and she has also earned her PMP.  She’s a Certified SAFe Agilist as well, as a Certified Scrum Master.  So she’s got some well-rounded advice. BILL YATES:  Yes, she does.  I can’t wait to have this conversation with Ren.  She joined us full-time in fall of 2022 as the Manager of Curriculum Development, and it’s just been a delight working with her, both as an instructor and now full-time on the team.  And we just wanted our listeners to be able to hear from Ren and hear about her experience. WENDY GROUNDS:  And questions about the PMP exam, as well. BILL YATES:  Yes, yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  She addresses some of that.  So we’re looking forward to this conversation.  Hey, Ren, thank you so much for joining us today. Meet Ren REN LOVE:  I’m so happy to be here.  Thank you for having me. WENDY GROUNDS:  We want to jump right in and ask you what your current position is. REN LOVE:  So here at Velociteach I am the Manager of Curriculum Development.  So I started off as an instructor for Velociteach for about seven months before being hired full-time.  And I’m in charge of updating and maintaining all of the course materials that we have here at Velociteach. BILL YATES:  That’s all.  There’s not much to that. REN LOVE:  Yeah, it’s a lot more than what it sounds. BILL YATES:  Yeah, never a boring moment, that’s for sure. Ren’s Project Management Journey WENDY GROUNDS:  Tell us a little bit about your career background, just some of your story and how you got into project management. REN LOVE:  So my road to project management was very unusual.  My early career, what I like to call my past life, that was in the sciences.  So I’ve got an undergraduate degree in environmental science.  My first master’s degree is in biology.  And I spent about 10 or so years working in the field of zoo, aquariums, science centers.  One of my first jobs ever I was working at Disney’s Animal Kingdom doing science education.  Then I worked at a local science center in South Carolina before moving into the role of education programs coordinator at the Greenville Zoo, where I was for a long time. So I think for a lot of people, we rethought our career choices when the pandemic hit.  And during the pandemic, a lot of zoos across the country were closing, and a lot of education departments were downsizing.  I got very lucky.  The zoo I was working for was owned by the city, and the city had made a pledge to not lay off anybody during the pandemic, which is just amazing.  But it did cause me to think to myself, what’s my future going to look like?  What’s my future career going to look like?  Not a ton of growth opportunities in that industry, just because it’s also very saturated with a lot of people.  You tend to retire out of those jobs.  People don’t just leave them. So I sat down, and I was chatting with my mother, Margo Love, who was a project manager for years and years and years and years, and talked a little bit about that as a potential career path.  And so she introduced me to project management.  We talked about the PMP exam, and I remember telling her, “Well, I’ve never done project management.”  And she convinced me that I had been doing project management this entire time.  I just wasn’t called a project manager.  And she said, “This is totally a possibility for you.  Look into it.” And so I did.  I started studying for it.  I passed the PMP exam in December of 2020.  And then I was hired by one of the Big Four firms by February of 2021.  So it was just a quick turnaround time from certification to becoming an official project manager.  That’s where it all kind of began.  I still sort of miss zoo life, but it’s been really exciting to try something brand new, very challenging, and also a little bit more lucrative.  That’s worth mentioning, too.  Leaving the zoo field to go to big business, for sure. BILL YATES:  There are so many correlations between life at the zoo and life as a project manager. REN LOVE:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  Life in the circus and life as a project manager. REN LOVE:  Yes.  So similar.  Though I will say I get bitten much less in this line of work.  The number has drastically declined. BILL YATES:  That’s one of my funniest stories of you, Ren, is I think you were showing some kind of creature to some elementary school kids, and you got bitten on the finger, and you were bleeding.  What was it that bit you?  I can’t remember what it was. REN LOVE:  Oh, it was a rooster named Fabio. BILL YATES:  A rooster. REN LOVE:  Yeah.  And I was just trying to play it off and be like, “Oh, this isn’t happening.”  And kids don’t let you do that.  They do not. BILL YATES:  “Miss Ren, your finger is bleeding.” REN LOVE:  Yeah. WENDY GROUNDS:  I’ve told you before that my brother works in a zoo, and he was bit by a hippo on the knee. REN LOVE:  Wow. WENDY GROUNDS:  Did a lot of damage. BILL YATES:  That’s going to leave a mark. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, yeah. REN LOVE:  That is significant.  I’ve met hippos before.  Usually they like to have their tongues rubbed.  And so that puts you in a very dangerous situation.  It takes a lot of trust. Memorable Success at Projects WENDY GROUNDS:  So looking at projects that you’ve done in the past, do you have some that are really memorable?  And what has led to their success? REN LOVE:  One of the most memorable ones, again, was very COVID-inspired, COVID-19 global pandemic.  But for the Greenville Zoo specifically, and lots of zoos across the country, one of their biggest sources of revenue is their summer zoo camp.  And so when I talk about a zoo camp project, it sounds very low stakes as opposed to something for NASA or something like that.  But when you consider the fact that these zoo camps bring in 50%, sometimes up to 75% of a department’s revenue for an entire year in just this 10-week cycle, it becomes really high stakes.  So having a successful zoo camp season can be a really big deal for kind of the survival of a zoo in general. And so during COVID you’re facing these regulations that were imposed by municipalities and things like that where no visitors are allowed on zoo grounds, just zoo staff.  And so we spent months waiting to hear what was going to happen because, if you remember at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of waiting.  There was a lot of, how long is this going to last?  Turns out a long time. BILL YATES:  Couple weeks, just a couple weeks. REN LOVE:  Yeah, just a couple weeks, and then a couple weeks, and a couple months.  And we finally heard back in the very beginning of May that zoo camp, if it was going to exist at all, had to be completely virtual.  And that was very challenging for us because all of our zoo camps, they started June 1st, and they’re all in person.  They all get to see animals and touch animals and get engaged.  And so we decided that we needed to maintain that revenue.  We would have to turn our zoo camps entirely virtual.  And that was a ton of moving, interlocking parts that had to happen. So I was one of the people who was in charge of contacting everybody who had registered for the in-person and keeping track of if they wanted a refund, if they wanted a spot in the virtual, or if they were feeling really kind and just wanted to donate that money to us and not want a refund.  We had a lot of those, which was just really lovely.