Read This Before You Discount Your Experience

Let me reset the room.

Everything I learned about project management, I learned carrying a set of Folger Adam keys, walking into a housing unit, and pretending I absolutely knew what I was doing… even when I didn’t.

That wasn’t impostor syndrome.

That was situational confidence—a survival skill.

Corrections ≠ “Non-Transferable”

Working in a jail is just a job.

Yes, the stakes are higher.

Yes, the consequences are real.

But when you clock in, you’re still running systems, managing humans, and preventing small problems from turning into five-alarm disasters.

And no, before anyone says it—this isn’t some “bootstraps trauma résumé” flex.

It’s operations.

Let’s Be Honest

Managing a housing unit of 60 adults is not wildly different from managing a SaaS implementation.

In both, you’re responsible for:

• Timelines

• Resources

• Movement and dependencies

• Documentation

• Escalations

• Stakeholder updates

• Risk mitigation

• And people who swear this one thing will only take “two minutes”

The difference?

In corrections:

• If you miss a dependency, someone gets hurt. In SaaS:

• If you miss a dependency, Slack lights itself on fire.

Same muscle. Different blast radius.

Controlled Chaos Is the Job

Corrections teaches you how to:

• Read a room before it explodes

• Stay calm while everyone else is loud

• Make decisions with partial intel

• Document everything because it will be questioned later

That’s not a “soft skill.”

That’s operational discipline.

And if you’ve ever run count, coordinated movement, or handled a unit on a bad day—congrats.

You’ve already done stakeholder management under pressure.

Mic Drop

Here's the truth some orgs don’t want to admit:

Titles don’t create operators. Pressure does.

If you’ve managed:

• Chaos

• Risk

• Humans with opinions

• Systems that can’t fail

You’re not “aspiring” to leadership.

You’ve been practicing it—just without a PowerPoint.

Stop waiting for permission.

Stop discounting your past.

And for the love of all things operational—stop letting people tell you your experience “doesn’t count.”

It does.

They just don’t know how to read it.