Creating PM Resources for Career Centers
I regularly hear the sentiment from current product managers that they wish they knew that product management was a viable career option back in school.
Schools and educational institutions are excellent starting points for future product managers; specifically, the career centers within high schools and colleges are fertile ground for fostering the next generation of PMs.
We believe that career centers are valuable for both students and employers. However, we’ve also found that career centers are experiencing a large unmet gap in resources to help students break into product management and excel in the role. And, we’ve found employers wishing that students were more ready for roles in product management.
Therefore, we seek to create and provide PM resources for career centers so that they can set their students up for success in product management careers. By doing so, we can create a win-win-win situation for students, for schools, and for employers.
Below, we discuss what the value of career centers are to society. We then identify gaps in product management resources for career centers. Finally, we share how Product Teacher is stepping into this gap.
The value of career centers
The value of career centers for both current students and graduated alumni is immense. Career centers serve as invaluable resources for individuals seeking to gain a competitive edge in the job market.
Career centers are a gateway to success for current students. They help students develop the skills needed to be successful in the career they’re interested in. Career centers provide access to resources such as career exploration tools, workshops, internships, job postings, and even one-on-one coaching. Students can use these resources to explore potential career options, assess their strengths and weaknesses, develop their interview and resume-writing skills, build their professional networks, and gain the skills needed to secure employment after graduation.
For students, career centers provide access to resources and opportunities that can be difficult to access on their own. Many career centers provide internships and job postings exclusive to their students, and they often partner with companies and organizations to create networking opportunities. Career centers also host career fairs, which bring together employers and potential employees in an effort to facilitate connections and match people with the right job opportunities.
For graduates and alumni, career centers provide invaluable resources as well. Many career centers provide workshops and courses designed to help alumni keep their skills up-to-date and discover new career opportunities. Career centers also provide access to job postings, alumni networks, and advice on making career transitions.
On top of that, career centers help individuals stay connected to their alma mater (i.e. the school from which they graduated). For many graduates, alumni networks are a great way to stay connected to their former classmates and colleagues. Through alumni networks, graduates can share advice and insights, access job postings, and even help each other find employment.
As the quality of product management talent from schools becomes stronger, product orgs are set up for more success in delivering positive value for their customers and their investors. When students are equipped with the right skill sets, product orgs make fewer mistakes, spend less time on training, iterate faster, and ship better products for all.
Therefore, career centers have a critical role to play in helping students succeed in product management. However, we’ve found that there are many unaddressed gaps in product management resources for students.
The product management gap in career centers
Product management is a popular career path for students around the world. After all, this career path is highly sought-after in tech, as it offers a variety of career opportunities.
Yet, despite its popularity and potential for success, product management remains relatively unknown and unrepresented on school campuses. The lack of accessible resources and understanding of product management has caused many students to overlook the field.
We find that both high school career centers and college career centers may be missing the following resources for students who are interested in product management:
Curriculum recommendations
Resume resources
Cover letter resources
Interview resources
On-the-job resources
Curriculum recommendations for future product managers
While many students are interested in product management, few of them have the necessary experience to curate their own curricula while in school, especially if they are currently taking prerequisites to graduate in a given major or concentration. And, many schools have not yet spun up dedicated tracks for product management.
Therefore, we see an opportunity for career centers to provide recommendations for students who are interested in product management, so that students can plan their academic workload to satisfy their requirements while also preparing for a fulfilling career in product management.
Resume resources for future product managers
We’ve also found that many students work with student clubs or informal student mentors to get help with their resumes to apply for PM internships or full-time entry-level PM roles.
But, in analyzing the material and the advice provided by student clubs and student mentors, we see significant gaps in their ability to hone resumes for product management tracks. As an example, most student club advice on resumes are limited to formatting, without sufficient discussion about how to prioritize the accomplishments of a given student.
For example, consider a leadership experience where a student led a community event: should this student focus more on the number of people they were in charge of, or should they focus more on the number of people who attended the event?
Furthermore, much of the resume advice provided by student clubs or career centers fail to account for the “product manager’s mindset” for framing student accomplishments:
Which customer segment are we solving for, and why?
Which one of their pains are we prioritizing, and why?
What solution did we ship to address this pain, and why?
How did we measure success, and how will we improve our solution in the future?
The product manager’s mindset can be applied to all sorts of experiences that aren’t formally labeled as product management. For example, students can apply the above lens to extracurricular activities like volunteering or club leadership, as well as homework assignments such as design projects, coding projects, or essays.
Career centers need to have resources that help students navigate this gap. Challengingly, many students perceive their resumes to be excellent, yet employers on the other end are finding that these resumes do not meet basic requirements for product management roles.
Cover letter resources for future product managers
A similar gap applies to student cover letters as well. The majority of student-driven advice on cover letters focuses on having the candidate showcase their personality and demonstrate their alignment with the corporate values of a given company.
However, few advice-givers identify that the point of a PM cover letter is to demonstrate to employers that the candidate has the ability to empathize with customer pain while making evidence-based decisions to maximize value using limited resources.
In other words, the cover letter should help the employer visualize the student as an effective product manager on the job, yet most cover letters from students fail this basic test.
Too many student cover letters focus on the personality of the student, and not enough student cover letters share 2-3 core narratives about the student’s ability to identify and solve an unmet need in their communities. This gap causes many students to falter in securing PM roles.
Therefore, career centers should ideally have resources to help students identify their core narratives. As each product management role requires a different set of skills from candidates (e.g. technical skills for integrations PMs vs. analytics skills for B2C PMs vs. negotiation skills for B2B PMs), career centers can help students succeed by providing resources to help students select which narratives to highlight in their cover letters, so that their job applications will strongly resonate with a given PM employer.
Interview prep resources for future product managers
While many students are eager to practice their PM interviews, their approach can sometimes be suboptimal. They may attempt to rush through as many practice problems as possible, rather than maximizing the learning and improvement that they get from a single round of practice.
Students may spend dozens or even hundreds of hours racing through practice scenarios without fully understanding how employers are evaluating their responses. This phenomenon creates a loss of productivity for students who must also juggle demanding academic schedules, extracurricular activities, family obligations, and other commitments.
And, even worse, students who leverage this brute-force approach of “quantity over quality” rarely secure PM job offers from employers.
Conversely, the students who engage in thoughtful practice can spend less than 30 total hours on interview prep while drastically increasing their likelihood of receiving a job offer in product management.
Career centers can shore up this issue by providing events or workshops that help students understand the value of effective practice, and can also provide mock interview rubrics that help students better calibrate their mock interview performance.
Skill training and on-the-job prep for future product managers
Even if a student is able to successfully secure a PM internship or an entry-level role, we’ve seen firsthand that many students struggle with on-the-job success.
Most product orgs are fast-paced and focused on high-velocity iteration rather than waterfall approaches towards “perfect” deliveries. However, schools tend to incentivize the opposite approach, as students are asked to ship perfect deliverables (e.g. essays, projects, exams, etc.) within a set deadline without the ability to iteratively improve on the same assignment.
Therefore, many students are ill-equipped to handle the product management operating philosophy of “fail fast, learn, and iterate,” as students are too focused on the concept of perfection. Students may mistakenly believe that product management is a career based on “taking clear orders from others” rather than “collaborating with others, making decisions under uncertain circumstances, and taking the initiative,” causing them to experience stress and frustration on the job.
To help reorient students towards iterative learning and proactive decision-making, career centers can provide recorded classes from experienced product managers or host alumni events for alumni to teach students key product management skills, ranging from design sprints to data analytics to user interviews.
The role of PM education companies in the student ecosystem
To address the lack of product management resources for students within career centers, product management education companies like Product Teacher have an important role to play. By providing free and discounted resources to career centers, we can empower students with the knowledge they need to successfully pursue a career in product.
We hope to see students of all concentrations embrace product management, whether they are pre-law or pre-med, computer science majors or visual arts majors, English majors or math majors, philosophy majors or business majors. In this way, our profession will become more inclusive and diverse, and we will ship more thoughtful, more humane, more empathetic, more profitable, and more sustainable products as a whole.
Our commitment to backing career centers
We are committed to backing career centers worldwide within both high schools and colleges, and we’re excited to be partnering with the UC Berkeley Career Center to run an initial pilot program for providing product management resources to students.
In short: we believe that empowering future product managers in school is more valuable than waiting until after they’ve graduated.
That is why we are eager to partner with career centers to accelerate their students and set them up for successful product management careers.
And, even if students decide not to pursue product management, they will still have gained valuable skills in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) that they will be able to carry with them in whichever career path they choose.
We are proud to be providing product management career resources to the UC Berkeley Career Center and the students that it serves. We’re running an initial “hybrid learning model” pilot on February 9, 2023, to provide actionable advice on PM resumes for students.
In this hybrid learning model, we will share recorded excerpts from our PM resume course while also providing live Q&A and targeted advice to attendees. Both current students at UC Berkeley and Cal alumni who graduated after 2018 may join for free (registration link here), and they will benefit through our experiences in enabling candidates to secure PM job offers at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and more.
We’re excited to iterate on this pilot program based on student feedback. For example, we hope to expand our coverage to PM interviews as well, as well as tackling on-the-job skills such as defining minimum viable products or sketching out paper prototypes for product concepts. We also hope to find ways to scale and systematize these resources, so that students can access them at any time without being restricted by either their availability or our availability.
This collaboration provides students with access to career training they may not have had access to before. By providing students with quality career training and access to experts in the field, Product Teacher and the UC Berkeley Career Center are helping to ensure that students have the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in product management.
This partnership is just the beginning of a larger initiative to provide students with access to career training, resources, and support. We are eager to deepen this collaboration in the future to give students access to the resources they need to reach their full career potential.
Our ask to our readers
If you are currently working at a career center and would like to collaborate with Product Teacher to provide students with access to high-quality product management preparation materials, please reach out to admin@productteacher.com; we’d love to find ways to collaborate and provide value for your students, your alumni, and your employers.
If you are a current student or an alumnus and you’d like to see your school work with Product Teacher, please reach out to a representative at your school’s career center. You can use this email template as a starting point to kick off the conversation.
Thank you for believing in our vision to make product management easier for everyone!
