FacebookLinkedInWhatsAppPocket
Get 7 days free access to all project management courses
The business world needs more highly skilled project managers. Otherwise, it will continue to bleed around a hundred million dollars (ouch!) for every billion it spends on projects and programs. Without the right talent and strategy, project schedules and budgets will remain elusive — with only 57% of all projects completed without additional funding, and only 51% successfully making the original deadline.
If you are a project management professional or planning to become one, the coming year will be a great time to progress your career and help businesses overcome the challenges ahead. But you’ll need the right project management skills to make an impact.
According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), a project’s success rate improves by approximately 40% when project managers possess and nurture the ideal skill set (a powerful mix of technical, leadership, and business management expertise).
Those in the know have been shining a spotlight on the increasing demand for project management skills in recent years. Computer World ranked project management among the hottest skills for 2017, while PMI projected a dramatic increase in the demand for project-oriented skills from 2017 through 2027. For each year during this period, companies around the world will need to fill an annualized figure of 2.2 million new project-oriented roles.
Despite the growing number of jobs, the serious lack of candidates with adequate project management skills creates a huge talent gap. With competition expected to become more intense across industries in the coming year, the scramble among recruiters for professionals with excellent project management skills will remain fierce in 2020, to say the least.
Want to learn more?
Take your project management skills to the next level with our comprehensive (and free) ebook!
Enter your email address
When strong demand meets scarce supply, prices go way up north. This can be alarming to employers but quite a good thing for project management practitioners. Entry level project managers in the U.S. receive a median annual salary of $70,249 while senior project managers easily take home $102,318 on average. The most skillful and ambitious — those at the high end of the scale — are worth more than $142,000 according to Glassdoor.
Project managers who obtain an industry-recognized credential like PMI’s Project Management Professional (PMP) certification have an extra edge. Research by the Project Management Institute revealed that project managers who earned a PMP Certification received a 20% higher median salary than non-certified project managers. The study found the median salary of a PMP was $111,000, compared to the median salary of $91,000 for those without a PMP certification.
Project management may well be the career where technical, business, and people skills routinely intersect.
To become a good project manager, technical skills are must-haves. You need full proficiency in the tools (such as project management software) and techniques (such as the Agile framework) of the trade.
While you don’t necessarily need to be a domain expert (e.g., non-architects or non-engineers can be project managers in construction while non-programmers can serve as project managers in software development), you need basic familiarity and topview knowledge of the field you are in.
In addition, you need to have a strategic and logistical perspective on each project you undertake to optimize cost efficiencies and benefits. And lastly, you need to possess leadership and people skills to effectively manage a diverse team of people who are also bringing their unique personalities and skill sets to the table.
We have broken down the top 25 project management skills for 2020 into 3 categories – technical skills, business management skills, and personality traits – in the handy matrix below.
Based on studies and recommendations from PMI, KPMG, EY (Ernst & Young), APM (Association for Project Management) and other domain experts, here’s a comprehensive project management skills matrix that can help you make a positive impact in 2020:
| Skill Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Project Management Software | Proficiency with commonly used technology tools such as Microsoft Project, Asana, and Trello. |
| Project Management Methodologies and Frameworks | Ability to apply frameworks and methodologies such as Agile and SCRUM throughout a project’s lifecycle. |
| Reporting/Stakeholder Management | Coordinate with managers, clients and team members to set expectations, deliverables, and objectives. |
| Team Building/Management | Build and lead a team of people with different skill sets towards a unified goal by guiding each member to complete their unique deliverables on time. |
| Resource Planning and Management | Formulate and implement a strategy on how project objectives can be met efficiently in the right sequence, by a group of people with unique skills within project constraints (time, budget, quality, etc.) |
| Time Management/Scheduling | Ability to 1) accurately map out talent resources, tasks, and dependencies; 2) make timeline estimates and set specific and general schedules; and 3) keep everyone up to speed. |
| Cost Assessment/Budget Management | Achieve cost efficiencies by optimizing work hours and establishing rationale for key procurements and other expenses. |
| Review/Monitoring | Tr ack overall project and individual stakeholder progress throughout the project lifecycle, resolving conflicts and optimizing gains along the way. |
| Conflict Management and Resolution | Fix project discrepancies, overlaps, stalled workflows, and other issues due to internal roadblocks or unforeseen external setbacks. Help address interpersonal conflicts among team members. |
| Policy Knowledge | An adequate grasp of the regulatory regime governing the sector, including health, safety, business best practices, and environment. |
| Skill Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Leadership | Enable, motivate, and inspire the team to meet deliverables within project constraints by demonstrating commitment, expertise, confidence, genuine concern, and ability to help everyone solve challenges and achieve goals. |
| Business Communications | Use the right language, tone, and storytelling techniques when communicating, describing, or explaining issues over email, chat, reports, presentations, and other forms and channels of communication. Generate the right impact or response from specific audiences (team members, managers, clients, vendors, partners, other stakeholders). |
| Collaboration/Relationship building | Establish a collaborative culture where people with unique personalities and skills happily work together towards a unified goal. |
| Decision-Making | Make prompt, informed, and fact-based decisions for the good of the project. |
| Accountability | Embrace ownership of and accountability for the project. |
| Problem Solving/Critical Thinking | Assess issues from different vantage points and formulate the best solution in addressing specific challenges. |
| Active Listening | Practice active listening to glean insight and truly understand the needs or message of all project stakeholders. |
| Negotiation | Apply the appropriate framework (SWOT, risk-reward, etc.) to arrive at a best-case scenario for all parties involved. |
| Research/Information Gathering | Fill knowledge gaps through active research or by directly engaging resource persons. |
| Skill Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Commitment/Motivation/Drive | The project manager owns the project and should be the person with the highest level of commitment and motivation to see it through from start to finish. |
| Goal-Orientedness | No one can become a decent project manager without a personality that places tremendous value on outcomes, objectives, and results. Project managers should be focused on the goal and the most efficient route to get there. |
| Confidence | Project managers should exhibit process mastery with confidence and humility. Bragging, bullying, and bossing around don’t work. |
| Open-mindedness/Trainability | Because continuous learning and self-improvement are integral to project management, practitioners should be open to new technologies, approaches, and experiences. |
| Adaptability/Proactivity | Workplaces, workflows and project development practices rapidly change over time. Hence, project managers should possess the required agility to nimbly adapt to different situations and make proactive adjustments when necessary. |
| Inclusivity/Sociability | The workplace is becoming more global and more diverse in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and other demographics. As such, project managers should embrace everyone in the team and help nurture a culture of fairness, diversity, and inclusivity. |
In addition to technical skills, companies are probing the job market for project management professionals with the right emotional intelligence, critical thinking, mentoring, and communication skills.
Here are some key takeaways for jobseekers who wish to participate in the project management field:
It’s easy to see why the appeal of a project management career can be very strong. The demand is high, the outlook is good, and the pay is head-turning. Job satisfaction, relevance, corporate impact, and self-worth similarly score very high on just about any metric.
But project management is not for everyone. This skill-intensive role fits people who actively seek out learning opportunities so they can discover new things, improve competencies and build their skill sets over the course of their career.
If you are that person — someone who likes to get
things done and embark on a journey of continuous learning — then nothing is stopping you from becoming the best project manager you can be.
Here’s a good place to start.
Looking for more project management resources around the web? Check out our list of the Top PM Blogs in 2020.
Want to learn more?
Take your project management skills to the next level with our comprehensive (and free) ebook!
Enter your email address
Joseph Mapue
Joseph Mapue wears his writer’s hat wherever he goes, crafting top-notch content on business, technology, creativity, and innovation. He is also a dreamer, builder, father, and gamer.
Skip to content