One of the things that makes searching for PM roles overwhelming is that there are approximately one million project management job titles. This makes sense, when you think about it; the flip side of how broad the field is (something I love about it!) is that you can call its practitioners so many different things.
Which, in my opinion, calls for a master list.
So without further ado, here it is: a list of everything I (and the PMs I crowd-sourced this with) have seen used as project-management adjacent job titles!
Job Titles Commonly Used in Project Management
Titles using project manager as the root:
- Project Manager
- Assistant Project Manager
- Senior Project Manager
- Junior Project Manager
- Deputy Project Manager
A quick note here on the use of assistant/associate/senior: just like in higher ed, this is going to depend on the size of the company and the size of the work they oversee. For example, it’s easy to imagine that the “pecking order” is assistant PM -> associate PM -> PM -> senior PM. At an organization that has each of those levels, that’s true!
But it’s not always true that comparing titles between organizations is apples-to-apples. Imagine a project manager at a small marketing agency. Because the agency is small, they may only have one PM… which means if that PM works there for 8 years and receives raises the entire time, they may be reaching a wildly different level of seniority and competence by the end of their time there… even though their title remains PM the entire time. Conversely, imagine a PM who climbs the ranks from associate PM to senior PM during the same 8 years at a large healthcare system. Both PMs are getting parallel experiences during this 8 years, but if you only compared their titles throughout, you would get a very different (often inaccurate) picture than what’s really going on.
Titles that are a “spin” on project manager:
- Project Supervisor
- Project Coordinator
- Project Analyst
- Project Director
- Project Lead
- Project Scheduler (I saw this exclusively from construction folks)
Titles that use “program”:
- Program Manager
- Program Director
Everything else:
- Team Lead (saw this a lot in construction & non-profit)
- PMO Lead/PMO Team Lead (“PMO” stands for Project Management Office and you’ll see it in organizations who’ve made an investment into building their PM capacity)
- Scrum Master (Scrum is a PM framework really common in tech, and they call their PMs “Scrum Masters”)
What should you do with this information?
I created this so that if you are currently job-searching for PM roles, you can take this list and use it to set up job alerts for any of the titles/positions on it.
Note that you can see some permutations of this list by tacking “junior”, “senior”, “associate”, etc onto any of these “root” titles. (Again, just note that these modifiers are helpful when comparing within an organization, but not between organizations.)
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