By MARIE WILSON
Q. I work in a technical/science field but want to move into people management/business development. How would I do it? I have an MSc in maths and physics and have been working in air quality in regional government.
A. People management and business development are two separate sets of skills, both of which are excellent complements to a science or technical background. Both can be developed through a combination of education, training and development experiences.
Managing people will require you to develop interpersonal and communication skills and abilities. Many people begin to develop these in special projects and team leadership roles where they have responsibility for managing others.
While this experience is helpful, it is better if you can build on it with feedback from others (asking how they think you can do better, and what are your strengths and weaknesses).
When New Zealand researchers built a profile of the characteristics of very effective managers, they found that the best managers set aside time on a frequent basis to review what was going well, or badly, and try to figure out why. You can use the same technique to look at yourself and other people managers that seem to do well.
You can also add education and training to the mix, after a careful review of areas where you need to know more or be more skilled. Again, this should be complemented with practice or observation, and learning from your experiences.
Effective people skills, including managing subordinates, peers and your boss, are critical to moving beyond a technical role and into management or general business.
Business development skills are also complementary to your technical background, but focused more at managing a business, rather than managing people (although managing people is often part of managing a business).
You can pick this up through being part of project teams where you initially contribute the technical aspects and learn from other team members. This is one area where it may be easier to start with a foundation of education or training in how business operates, and then use the new knowledge as a platform for expanding the type of work you do.
Your goal would be to build a good overview of how new opportunities are identified or created, how new products or services are developed to meet market needs, and how businesses build and grow around these products and services.
If you are making this transition on your own, it could take several years to build from a purely technical, non-business role to one where you are bringing together technology and business in a business development or commercialisation role.
I recommend reading Bill Bygrave's book The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship to give you a good start in pulling together some of the different areas of business.
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