Junior Project Manager

About the Role

ITW Car Care is looking for a Junior Project Manager who is early in their career and eager to build it fast. This is a hands-on role for someone who wants to learn how products actually get made and launched — working shoulder to shoulder with R&D, marketing, supply chain, operations, and our strategic suppliers to move projects from concept to shelf. You will own real project work from day one: timelines, milestones, action items, and the follow-through that keeps a cross-functional team honest about its commitments. We are looking for someone who will drive the schedule, chase the gaps, and bring the team with them.

Key Responsibilities

• Own project schedules and Project Charters. Build, maintain, and communicate detailed project plans — milestones, dependencies, owners, and due dates — and keep them current as reality changes.
• Transfer the technical requirements, business value propositions, targets and constraints to the project charter.
• Balance priorities and manage stakeholder (leadership team) expectations while ensuring alignment with overall business strategy.
• Drive execution. Track deliverables against commitments, flag slippage early, escalate when needed, and close open items; identify upcoming risks and work cross-functionally with teams to find possible solutions.
• Lead cross-functional coordination. Serve as the connective tissue between R&D, marketing, supply chain, procurement, quality, regulatory, manufacturing, and sales. Run the meeting, set the agenda, publish the actions, follow up.
• Manage stakeholder communication. Deliver clear, concise status updates and dashboards to project teams and leadership. Make the status obvious — green, yellow, red, and why.
• Identify and mitigate risk. Anticipate what could derail a launch — supplier lead times, testing delays, artwork approvals, capacity — and get ahead of it with a plan, not an excuse.
• Support new product development and commercialization. Help shepherd projects through stage-gate reviews, ensuring deliverables and documentation are complete at each gate.
• Improve how we work. Contribute to standardizing project templates, trackers, and processes. Apply ITW's 80/20 mindset to focus effort where it drives the most impact.
• Learn the business. Spend time on the plant floor, with our brands, and with customers to understand how decisions land downstream.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Project Management, Business, or a related field.
• 0–2 years of experience; internships, co-ops, or academic capstone project leadership count.
• Working knowledge of core project management fundamentals — scope, schedule, budget, risk, stakeholder management, and the critical path.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office; comfort with Excel and PowerPoint at a level that lets you build a tracker and present a status deck without help.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the confidence to hold peers and senior stakeholders to commitments.
• Legally authorized to work in the United States; able to work onsite in Houston, TX.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to CAPM, PMP coursework, Agile/Scrum, or Lean Six Sigma concepts.
• Familiarity with project management tools (MS Project, Smartsheet, Asana, Monday.com) and ERP systems (SAP, Oracle).
• Internship or co-op experience in consumer products, chemicals, automotive aftermarket, or manufacturing.

What We're Looking For

The degree gets you in the room. These traits are what will make you successful here:

• Aggressive growth mindset. You want more responsibility than your title suggests. You seek feedback, act on it, and are visibly better six months from now than you are today.
• Bias for results. You measure yourself by what shipped, not by what was discussed. You close loops.
• Cross-functional credibility. You build trust quickly with people who don't report to you, and you can influence without authority.
• Ownership and accountability. You hold yourself — and the team — to the date that was committed, and you raise your hand early when it's at risk.
• Comfort with ambiguity. You can make progress with incomplete information and ask the right questions to fill the gaps.
• Composure under pressure. You stay steady, direct, and solution-oriented when a project goes sideways.