Many of management jobs require the candidates to have some experience of managing projects and teams. But how do people get their first management experience? I have heard people with no technical experience got their first engineering jobs by doing MOOCs and practicing coding in spare time, but this approach doesn't seem to be applicable for management.
There are formal definitions of "project manager", and in an industry like architecture/engineering/construction the formal definition is typically a person who supervises architects, engineers and construction superintendents. But the joke used to be that in a lot of companies it can mean a CAD jockey with a telephone [this is in the days before everybody had a cell phone and email]. I even heard one person tell someone they were a project manager because they managed theirself. Having just met a fresh CS graduate whose first job is Senior IT Analyst, I think some things never change.<p>Anyway, the way most people get involved in project management without title inflation is by tackling increased responsibilities within their workplace. This requires a boss who is willing to delegate and an employee who appears capable of receiving delegated responsibility.<p>It's important to realize that managing is not supervising. Sometimes a single person has these responsibilities overlap, but a managing people is orthogonal to enforcing a company's HR policies except in so far as they relate to who can be assigned which tasks, how many hours can be assigned, etc. To put it another way, the supervisor cares what time you roll out of bed and into work. A manager just cares about the results of your work (though those results may include the effects on other members of the team).<p>Good luck.
Leading smaller projects, training junior staff members, deputising for existing managers & generally showing you are capable and aware of management responsibilities even before you are in a managerial role.