5 August, 2024

Project Management Skills: What Makes Them Super Valuable? I’ll Tell You


Project Management is a valuable skill set. The skills of a project professional enable you to deliver big, complex, important changes. And organizations are prepared to pay for that. This is what makes Project Management a career option.

But not everyone wants to build
a Project Management career.

You may have developed your Project Management skills so you could deliver a specific Project. Maybe you got them as a part of your overall professional or managerial skill set.

Or, maybe you set off to build a Project Management career, and then you discovered that this is not the career for you. At this point, you may wonder:

‘How useful will these Project Management skills be, in other areas of my work?’

‘Are my Project Management skills transferable to other domains?’

The Value of Project Management Skills

We’ll examine the answers to these questions and consider:

  1. Are Project Management Skills Transferable?
  2. Ten Transferable Project Management Skills
  3. Is Organizing Activities Truly the Most Fundamental of All Project Management Skills?
  4. Once You Have Your Project Management Skills…

Okay! Let’s get started…

Are Project Management Skills Transferable?

Project Management Skills: What Makes Them Super Valuable? I'll Tell You

Without a doubt, the answer is an emphatic ‘Yes’.

Not only is Project Management a core workplace skill that all professional and managerial workers will need… You can take that as read. But the component Project Management skills will all make you better at your job.

Maybe you are supervising a team in professional services, leading a shift in a factory or warehouse, or managing yourself as a creative solo entrepreneur. For all of these, and more, Project Management skills will help you be more effective, more disciplined, and more successful.

Not Knowledge Areas, Not Domains, Not Processes, Not Practices…

Before we look at the skills I have selected, I do want to clarify that I am not here referring to knowledge areas, domains, processes, practices, or even principles. Some of the labels will, inevitably, overlap. But I am not linking this to the way any of the methods or frameworks break Project Management down.

Where I Have Applied My Own Project Management Skills

In a moment, we’ll take a look at ten areas where Project Management skills can contribute to a successful career. Inevitably, the selection will be somewhat subjective. These are Project Management skills I find useful outside of Project Management. I have used them in:

  • starting businesses,
  • running them,
  • serving clients,
  • writing books,
  • speaking at events and conferences.
  • training project managers, and
  • building a YouTube channel.

If you are wondering how deeply these skills became ingrained during my years as an active Project Manager, perhaps my writing career is relevant. I have written 14 print books of which 4 are unambiguously Project Management books. Of the other 10, all but one are based on skills I learned and developed as a Project Manager.

So, let’s take a look at these…

Ten Transferable Project Management Skills

In amongst this personal list you will find both hard and soft Project Management skills. One thing that strikes me, as I prepare the list, is this. The skills I list are neatly balanced between the two. I didn’t plan the list that way, but it does endorse my general view that a balance between these two aspects of Project Management is essential.

Self Discipline

People often ask me:

‘How can I create the habit of getting up early to start work in that super creative, hyper productive, early morning slot?’

Glancing at the clock on my Mac, I can see I have been up just over an hour. It is 6:05 am. And I have made a cup of tea, chosen my blog topic, sketched out its structure, and written as far as here.

People also ask:

‘How can I motivate myself to do something difficult, over an extended period?’

You may want to launch a business, create a book, or deliver a project.

The answer to both always includes self-discipline.

I wish there were an easy answer here, but there is not. It’s practice and determination. So, it may be simple, but I will grant you that it is not easy! But, do it often enough, and it becomes habit.

As a Project Manager, you will spend your working life looking ahead and struggling with the now. You will combat setbacks as well as bask in success. You’ll need to put on your ‘game face’ for your team and your client. And you’ll need to do all this whether you feel at 100 percent, or at 20 percent. If training to serve in the military is not for you, then becoming a Project Manager is one of the best ways in civilian life to learn the habit of discipline.

By the way… This may be one of the many reasons I have found that ex-service personnel so often make excellent Project Managers.

Personal Effectiveness

One of the essential Project Management skills is the ability to balance a range of different workloads. Examples include:

  • co-ordinating your team,
  • tracking progress,
  • solving problems,
  • engaging stakeholders, and
  • managing your own admin.

Multi-tasking is a poor way to get things done. So Project Managers need to find other ways to be effective. We do.

Indeed, my best-selling book is not a Project Management book. It is How to Manage your Time, since you ask. At the heart of this book is my OATS Principle for personal time management. It is based on two things: human psychology, and Project Management principles.

Another of my best-selling books is Powerhouse. In this book, I take the essential steps of managing a project, and apply the principles to personal effectiveness.

For more on personal effectiveness, do take a look at our guide to: The Best Personal Effectiveness Books for Project Managers.

Multiple Projects

One of the biggest challenges Project Managers ask me about is how to manage multiple projects at the same time. I have answered this three times in text and video:

Forward Thinking

As a Project Manager, you need to be thinking ahead: project planning is one of the core Project Management skills. And, if you want to be successful in business; particularly at a senior level when you’ll be making strategic decisions, this is crucial.

The ability to think ahead and make plans will be a huge asset to you. Did you notice that there are two aspects here?

  1. Strategy: On the strategic side, there is the ability to see what may be coming (which we’ll consider below).
  2. Tactics: On the more tactical side, there is the capability to set in train a series of activities that direct the future. This planning.

You may want to read our Project Planning Process: Navigate the Many Steps You Need or watch a video covering much of the same content: Project Planning Process – How to Build Effective Project Plans | Video.

Planning often goes wrong, though. So do take a look at our guide to 12 Project Planning Mistakes… and How to Fix Them.

Anticipating Events

Of all the Project Management skills, one will be most highly valued in a commercial world. This is your ability to see into the future. Share on X

And this is what the discipline of risk management will teach you. In risk management, you learn to anticipate a range of possible events (scenarios) and plan for them. We use mitigations to minimize the impact or likelihood of unwanted events. And we use contingency plans to handle them should they occur.

Fundamentally, risk management starts with systematically anticipating what could happen in the future. And it does so without the kind of ‘optimism bias’ that gets organizations into long-term difficulties.

Analytical Thinking

Whatever career you choose, your ability to think analytically will serve you and your employer well. It will allow you to understand a complex web of influences. And, once again, Project Management offers a fabulous environment in which to learn these skills. You need to be able to monitor your project, evaluate what is going on, and prepare structured, concise, and accurate reports. This is another of the essential Project Management skills.

You also need to be able to understand status and diagnose what is wrong, when things start to slip away from your plan. This leads us to another skill that Project Managers get to practice a lot…

Problem-Solving

One humorous definition of a Project has a lot of truth to it:

‘A Project is a series of problems which when solved, lead to the creation of something new.’

So, as a Project Manager, you will find yourself solving new problems every day. And that’s as it should be. Because you are doing something new and often complicated and ambitious.

For most Project Managers, this is one of the more exciting aspects of our career choice. But it is far from the only career that throws up problems to solve. So problem-solving is another of our highly transferable Project Management skills.

And, finally, to learn the systematic skills, read:

Communication

All human endeavor rests on communication. In the mid-1990s, Daniel Goleman published Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence. Since then, we have understood that our abilities to manage our moods, to get on with others, and to work with and through other people, are more important to our career success than our intellect.

Problem-solving is valuable. But the ability to do it with others is more important than the ability to do it alone. And, at the heart of interacting with others, is communication. Four of my 14 books are explicitly about communication. All four build on skills I learned as a Project Manager. I also have a low-cost eBook, Emotional Intelligence: A Management Courses Introduction.

Here is a list of my favorite communication skills books for project managers:

And, you may also like these videos and articles from our archive:

Stakeholder Engagement

One of my four Project Management books is about Stakeholder Engagement (The Influence Agenda). In whatever role you find yourself, you will need to be able to hear a range of views, take them into account, and communicate your perspective.

Stakeholder engagement goes beyond consultation, informing, and influencing. It does these things in a planned and managed way. It is that deliberateness will lift you from being a good communicator to a strategic communicator.

Like risk management, stakeholder engagement is another of the essential project management skills. So, as you’d expect, we have a lot of articles about this, and a Kindle-format eBook that collates them for your convenience. Here are some of my favorites:

Organizing Events

If there is one part of the Project Management skill set that almost defines Project Management, it is this… ‘Imposing structure and control over events’. Organizing activities is the most fundamental of all Project Management skills. It includes:

  • sequencing and scheduling tasks,
  • securing and allocating resources to them, and
  • sharing them out.

And it is also one of the most transferable. All of your life – not just work – demands that we can organize events to make things happen. You may be managing a marketing campaign, maintaining equipment, constructing a product, or delivering goods.  The list is endless.

Is Organizing Activities Truly the Most Fundamental of All Project Management Skills?

Maybe not…

Leading People

Organizing activities is one thing. Motivating and leading people to carry them out is quite another.

Not only is it pointless to organize just the tasks if you can’t lead the people, but tasks are ‘easy’. They do what you tell them to do. It was Tom Peters who pointed out that it is the ‘soft stuff’ that is truly hard, and in my experience, he is right. Getting a grip on how to co-ordinate a thousand activities is nothing compared to motivating your team to deliver them all on time, to budget, and at the quality you want.

Some people may see Project Leadership as a separate discipline from Project Management. But it is impossible to imagine a successful Project Manager who is not also a great Project Leader.

Of all the Project Management skills, I suspect it is leadership that is the most transferable.

If this is an area where you want to learn more, we really have you covered! We have a lot of articles for you to read:

We also have those articles collated into a handy Kindle-format eBook.

And, we have a hugely popular video course:

Day-to-Day Leadership that Gets Results

Learn more about this course, about which Nadia Panchaud said:

I like that the course was not pretentious and that it focused on concrete situations and aspects of leadership.

Once You Have Your Project Management Skills…

When should you use them? This is the subject of an accompanying article to this one called ‘Right Time, Right Move: When Should You Embrace Project Management?’. Why not take a look?

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Mike Clayton

About the Author...

Dr Mike Clayton is one of the most successful and in-demand project management trainers in the UK. He is author of 14 best-selling books, including four about project management. He is also a prolific blogger and contributor to ProjectManager.com and Project, the journal of the Association for Project Management. Between 1990 and 2002, Mike was a successful project manager, leading large project teams and delivering complex projects. In 2016, Mike launched OnlinePMCourses.
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