Building a Career That’s No Accident

APMP works to support those who enter the proposal world unexpectedly while also creating opportunities to steer professionals into the field

APMP members often joke that their careers as proposal professionals began when they were just walking down the hall and someone pulled them into an office and asked them for help. “They said, ‘Charlie’s a pretty good writer—let’s get him to help us,’” says Charlie Divine, CPP APMP Fellow, APMP’s director of certification. “Or, ‘Hey, there’s Betty! I saw her draw some stuff. Let’s get Betty to help with this.’ It was kind of a haphazard thing.”

A career in proposal management is often a matter of happy accident, started when an individual happens to be in the right place at the right time—that time when a boss, colleague, or co-worker needs help with an RFP or some kind of sales support. Many who excel at that initial task are assigned more work like it, and they may eventually steer millions of dollars in contracts for firms and clients, even without formal education or training.

Happening into a Career

Until that initial strike of lightning, many successful proposal management professionals never set out to be proposal managers. “No one I know purposely decided to become a proposal professional,” says Jeannette K. Waldie, CPP APMP, principal consultant of Houston-based JK Waldie & Associates.

Waldie first found herself writing proposals after she dropped out of college and took a temporary job with a defense contractor. “I was hooked on it immediately because I like to write,” she says. After relocating to Houston, Waldie landed a job as a secretary with an environmental firm, again putting her organizational skills and writing talent to work on proposals. She leveraged that experience to get a job in the proposals department at KBR, a technical writing firm. “That’s when things took off,” she says.

Waldie joined APMP in 2003 and has volunteered with the Houston Chapter ever since. That involvement was “a huge assist in my career,” she says. Today, she holds a degree in marketing and has her own firm, which handles a variety of clients—from small, minority-owned businesses to multinational corporations.

Certification brought validation for her services, and APMP’s courses and webinars augmented that certification with ongoing education, helping her sell clients on suggestions. “With [the courses], I’m able to say, ‘See, I’m not the only one who says this,’” says Waldie.

Waldie attended her first APMP conference four years ago at Walt Disney World. She sent her youngest son, who was in high school at the time, to the theme park while she soaked up all of the professional development. “The conference is my Disney World,” Waldie says. “Not only do I get to learn from the best of the best, but I also get to share my knowledge. It helps me know I’m not alone in this crazy profession.”

“The conference is my Disney World. Not only do I get to learn from the best of the best, but I also get to share my knowledge. It helps me know I’m not alone in this crazy profession.”
— Jeannette K. Waldie, Principal Consultant, JK Waldie & Associates

Following the Muse

Robin Davis, CF APMP Fellow, founder and principal consultant of Metre, had an associate’s degree in secretarial science when she moved to Nashville to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter. “I did the circuit for a couple of years and realized that I wasn’t going to be one of those special people who makes a living that way,” she says.

Fortunately, she had a day job as an administrative assistant with Healthways, a company that designs wellness programs for insurance companies. Healthways started getting RFPs. “[Someone from] the sales team would say, ‘Hey Robin, is this something you can pull together for me?’ After doing a couple of them, I thought, ‘This is someone knocking on our door, wanting to buy something—and we’re not treating it as strategically as we should.’”

Davis’s role grew as her proposals got results, but she felt there was more to the process than what she could learn by doing. “I found APMP and told my boss that I needed to go to a conference to see what it was all about,” she says.

At the 2002 Bid & Proposal Con in Salt Lake City, Davis found that the job she had defined for herself had an established set of best practices and thousands of seasoned practitioners. “I thought, ‘This is the promised land! These are my people!’” she says. “I am not alone. I don’t have to figure this out all by myself. Everyone has this figured out already.

“The things I learned about the process were huge,” she says. “[Knowing about] the database tools—and the fact that there were others out there to network with and learn from—was huge. It made all the difference in the world. I told my boss [that] there are hundreds of people who have been doing this a long time. They have strategies that are proven and effective, and all we had to do was follow them.”

“APMP allowed me to create my own career path. Everything I learned, I learned from APMP or the people I met there.” — Robin Davis, Founder and Principal Consultant, Metre

Davis was senior director of the company’s 10-person knowledge management and proposals team by the time she struck out on her own in 2009 with Metre, a firm that manages proposal development, sales operations, and market research for health care companies. “In music, anything without meter is a bunch of noise,” she explains. “As proposal writers, we bring everything together and set the pace to tell a story.”

APMP certification has helped prove the value of her services to clients. “Certification is important,” Davis says. Ongoing education has helped focus her career, she adds. “It’s something I like to do, and I’m pretty good at it. APMP allowed me to create my own career path. Everything I learned, I learned from APMP or the people I met there.”

From Networks to Network

Even APMP’s Divine started out in another field. Educated as a physicist, he got on-the-job training in proposal management with Southwestern Bell (SBC) at the turn of the century, when salespeople were having a hard time getting customers to subscribe to its data networks. “We tried to simplify things by going along with the salesperson,” he says. “What we were doing was writing proposals, and we didn’t know it.”

When large companies such as Boeing started signing on, Divine began recruiting people with backgrounds in journalism and graphic design, occasionally cherry-picking public relations staffers facing layoffs as SBC right-sized. “I filled my whole organization with journalists,” he says. “I recruited a group of communicators who could take complicated information, find out what customers needed, and listen to the salespeople.”

Most of the skills a proposal management professional needed early on were clerical, he notes. “There were people writing proposals 35 years ago with typewriters and correction tape,” says Divine.

“One day, we said, ‘Let’s get a conference room and make a profession out of this,’” Divine says. “Having come from a place where almost anybody could write a proposal to creating a set of defined entry-, mid- and advanced-level competencies has brought the profession to a different realm.”

Waldie and Davis agree that the biggest requirement is being able to write coherently. “Writing is obviously helpful,” Davis says. “Everything else can be learned. Once you’re in proposals, you can find your way to what you like to do best.”

Making Education Official

Davis says APMP should continue to focus on getting proposal management coursework into college and trade school curricula. She went to a “get-in/get-out-fast” school and believes that the discipline can be taught in the same way.

Ongoing education can help the accidental proposal professionals prove their value, Davis adds. “On the commercial side, everyone grows out of other areas, as I did. It’s seen as somewhat of a clerical position. It doesn’t get the respect it deserves; people don’t understand the value. My mantra is ‘What are you doing to change that?’

“Professionals must stay relevant. Look at all of the programming and offerings in the local chapters and international conferences,” she says. Even if a webinar focuses on federal spending, “You are going to learn something. Every presenter has something to offer. Listen and take from it what you can.”

“We really want to move out of this mode of accidentally getting into the profession to having a defined profession. We want people to understand that it’s a real profession, and they can make a conscious choice to prepare themselves for it.” — Charlie Divine, Director of Certification, APMP

Prior to APMP, people learned only from each other’s “war stories,” Divine says, when they imparted their experiences in making things up as they went along. Now, the APMP Body of Knowledge is the ultimate resource that shows people how to proceed. “We really want to move out of this mode of accidentally getting into the profession to having a defined profession,” he says. “We want people to understand that it’s a real profession, and they can make a conscious choice to prepare themselves for it.

“We’ve taken it from that job anybody can do and defined this set of core competencies for proposal managers at all levels, and we built the first certification around those competencies,” Divine says. “There is a set of standards for the behaviors, knowledge, and skills that you need in order to do this job well. APMP has designed a certification program that takes a bunch of disparate professions and creates a profession out of it.”

Continuing education helps members identify and cover gaps in their knowledge, he adds. And certification is helping push salaries higher—lifting all boats, no matter where they sailed from. “Every once in a while, I’ll hear, ‘I’ve been doing this for 40-plus years; I don’t need to get certified,’” Divine says. “And I say to them, ‘You’re right! But every time another person gets certified and stands up for our professional standards, it helps us all—and we would love to have your help.’”


Ian P. Murphy is a freelance writer and editor based in Chicago, Illinois.

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