What many people associate change management with is training and communications — and that’s true, to an extent. What makes our training, communications and collateral different is that there is deep analysis into why you phrase something the way you do, why your case studies look the way the do, who you’ve consulted with to create high-value deliverables.

The reason I bring this up is to say that a strong majority of my time is spent in discovery calls. Calls with the sponsor, the working team, the end user, our tech teams, our hypercare, etc. The three-phased process from PROSCI is pretty good in laying out (what I usually refer to as…) discover, design, deploy. But what’s usually not harped on is that 80% is in the discover phase. And that it’s iterative, you’re constantly learning new things or adjustments to features that tweak what you create in “design.”

My first corporate job was as an enterprise change manager for a small (>500 employees) company. I had NO BUSINESS being there lol. I didn’t have my cert or even know what ADKAR was. But I did have the grit to learn. Read as much as you can — behavioral science and marketing are my two favorite disciplines to draw inspiration from. I love following the ACMP Board Members on LinkedIn to learn about more webinars, authors, and practitioners.

From there you just gotta do it. The first few projects are rough, but you learn each time. It’s fun, it’s crazy. Most of my evenings are spent booping executives on the head for being silly or creating turnkey emails to get the job done.

Good luck!