Steven Lefkowitz owes his job as an IT project manager at Partners HealthCare to his 75-pound golden retriever. In 2013 he struck up a conversation with the woman who was going to care for the dog while Lefkowitz and his wife were on vacation. “She knew I was in job search mode,” he recalls, and she told him to send her his resume. (Although she didn’t work at Partners, she knew someone who worked there.)

Nancy McKinney fits the profile of someone who found herself a project manager by accident. A project manager at Spencer Technologies, an IT and communications provider, McKinney did phone system programming, installation and maintenance, as well as some IT-related work at Bank of Boston for 25 years. Over the course of her career, she started getting asked to manage subcontractors installing phone systems at various locations, which required scheduling workers, dealing with maintenance requests and invoicing. At one time, she says, she was running as many as 25 projects at a time.

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