My success story as a mentee by Marinela Boyadzhieva

We are happy to introduce you to Marinela Boyadzhieva - one of the participants in the pilot edition of the PMI Bulgaria Chapter Mentoring Program which ended in the spring of 2020.

Marinela is an IT professional with more than ten years of experience in the industry and she’s currently working as a Scrum Master. Having started her career as a QA engineer, she moved through different roles like Test Lead, Test Automation Engineer and Test Automation Project Lead. She has had the chance to work on different kinds of projects in the areas of payments, online betting and gaming industry and overseeing the full software development life-cycle, starting with waterfall and transitioning to agile practices. Still she decided to go for a change about two years ago and switched her focus fully to project management. She started with several trainings and certifications and this is how she came across PMI and PMI Bulgaria Chapter and started following all project management related events and initiatives. Later on she became PMP certified and hopes to go for the PMI-ACP shortly as well.

Marinela says she’s very proud to share that she was part of the Pilot Mentoring Program of PMI Bulgaria Chapter. She came across into it on the PMI Bulgaria Chapter website and without any hesitation, she decided to apply as a mentee. "It was a great opportunity for me to get connected to PM professionals and learn from their experience" says Marinela today. And she continues: "I was lucky to have Nadya Milenkova, an exceptional PM professional, as my mentor. It was the perfect match - professionally and personally. Nadya has vast experience in service management projects, I myself in software development projects, mostly applying agile practices and this made our collaboration unique. She shared a lot of success stories, good practices and PM knowledge from her own experience in the area. I had the chance to grab a lot of tips and tricks which are very useful today in my work. It was a great pleasure for me to discuss various "waterfall related" topics with Nadya and become more skilful and confident in the PM area". Marinela shares that sheI gained insights into the service management projects, including its specifics and how they differ from the software development projects.

We were glad to hear that Marinela is now fully convinced to continue developing her skills in project management and does not regret the switch. And she continues with a thank-you note to her mentor: "Thank you very much , Nade, for your time and effort, dedication and continuous support. Keep the great work and your endless enthusiasm and energy forever! I wish everyone participating in the program to have a mentor like you!"

We were also happy to have participants like Marinela who finished up this success story with another recommendation: "So I would like to recommend the PMI Bulgaria Chapter Mentorship program to everyone with little or no knowledge in project management but eager to learn from professionals and share knowledge and experience. It provides a great opportunity for collaboration and long-term friendship".