BridgeWorks
Tasha Brooks did not walk into her first BridgeWorks intake meeting thinking she was going to become a project manager. She walked in because her shift at the retail store she had worked at for eight years had been cut from 38 hours to 26, and she needed a path that would not depend on someone else's scheduling decisions.
That was three years ago. Today, she manages a $2.4 million annual capital improvement portfolio for a regional health system. Her role title is Project Manager II. Her base salary is $86,000.
Tasha agreed to share the full version of how this happened, because, in her words, "the version of me from three years ago needed to read a story that did not skip the hard parts."
The Starting Point
Tasha had spent eight years as a shift lead at a national retailer, including five years running a multi-employee team during the busiest hours. She was good at it. The store consistently met its operational metrics. New hires asked to be on her shift. She had never thought of any of this as transferable.
"I just thought of myself as someone who worked at a store," she said. "When the hours started getting cut, I started looking at job listings, and the only thing I felt qualified for was another store. The wages were the same or worse. I was tired in a way I could not explain."
She found BridgeWorks through a flyer at her credit union.
The First Stop: Skills Assessment
Our intake process starts with a structured skills assessment, designed to surface transferable skills that participants often discount. For Tasha, the assessment surfaced something she had never put on a resume: she had been planning, scheduling, coordinating, and reporting on multi-week store initiatives for years. Holiday floor resets. Training rollouts for new POS systems. Cross-team coordination during regional inventory counts.
"Project management" was not the language she used. It was the language her work had been doing.
That reframe matters. The first conversation many of our participants have with a career advisor is the first time anyone has helped them inventory the skills they actually have. Tasha left her first session with a different mental model of herself. She also left with a clearly mapped credential pathway: CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management), then PMP (Project Management Professional) once she had the experience hours to qualify.
The Slow Middle
This is the part that resume narratives usually skip. Tasha started the CAPM prep program in our evening cohort while still working her retail shifts. The coursework was 14 weeks. The class met three nights a week. She also had two kids and was the only adult at home most nights.
"There were weeks where I almost quit," she said. "There was a stretch in the middle of week six where I missed two classes because my younger one was sick, and I was sure I had blown the whole thing."
She had not. Our cohort instructor reached out, sent her the recordings, and they did a one-on-one catch-up call the following week. She came back. She passed the CAPM exam on her first attempt in March of her second program year.
The First Project Job
A CAPM is a meaningful credential, but it does not by itself land someone a project manager job. The next step was finding a role that would let her start building the documented project hours she would need for a future PMP.
Through one of our employer partnerships, she landed an interview for a Project Coordinator role at a regional construction firm. The role paid $52,000 — less than she had hoped, more than she was making at the store. She got the offer.
She took it. Project coordinator is not project manager, but it is one rung lower on the same ladder. She spent 18 months in that role, doing the genuinely unglamorous work of meeting minutes, schedule updates, change order tracking, and stakeholder follow-through. Along the way, she built the documented project hours she needed for the PMP.
She passed the PMP exam in October of her third program year. Two months later, she applied for the project manager role at the health system. She got the offer at $86,000.
What Tasha Says Made the Difference
We asked her this directly. Her answer was specific and worth quoting.
"Three things, in order. First, the person at intake who told me I had been doing project management work for years before I had a name for it. That changed how I walked into the next room.
"Second, the cohort. The class made me show up on the nights I would have skipped. The other students made it feel like the work was something we were doing together, not something I was failing at alone.
"Third, the project coordinator job. I really did not want to take it. The pay was too low. It felt like a step backwards. The advisor I was working with at the time told me, very gently, that the gap between coordinator and manager was a year and a half if I worked at it, and that I could not jump that gap from outside. He was right. I would not be where I am if I had held out for a manager title from day one."
Where Things Are Now
Tasha's youngest started kindergarten last fall. She has health insurance through her employer for the first time in her adult life. She is one year into her current role and is being mentored toward a Senior Project Manager promotion track.
She has also volunteered to come back and speak at the next CAPM cohort orientation. She wants to tell the version of the story that includes the hard middle, because she remembers needing to hear it.
A Note from Us
Tasha's path is not a template. We are sharing her story because the texture of it is honest. There is no overnight transformation here, no single magic moment, no luck of the draw. There is a lot of patient work, some good early advising, a credential, a tough job choice that turned out to be the right one, another credential, and another job choice. That sequence is replicable. We see versions of it every year.
If you are reading this and thinking that some piece of Tasha's story sounds like your starting point, our intake team takes new appointments every week. The first conversation is free, takes about an hour, and may surprise you with what surfaces.
