The profession of Project Manager (PM) is an interesting one. It allows for a professional development, building valuable business contacts and may be well paid. At the same time, it is a not an easy profession.
If you want to be good in this role, it requires profound knowledge and competences, incl. soft ones. It requires a high personal resilience and it is seen as difficult profession due to high levels of stress you need to bear working from deadline to deadline.
Those who are looking for a project manager may confirm it is not easy to find the right candidate. Sometimes, only during the interview, it is obvious that a candidate is not suitable. It also happened that after hiring, first months of work proves that the promising candidate was not suitable for the role, being only theoretically prepared to manage project delivery and lead a team.
There is no doubt that knowledge in the field, incl. project management tools is important. However, this is not enough. Next to the knowledge, there is a set of soft skills which are often decisive in a Project Manager work. My experience shows that these skills are rather difficult to be possessed just from theoretical classes. Project Managers work with people and for people. Being a key person in the project team, they need to be present and engaged.
Concentrating mainly on reports and a monitoring of the schedule, it is difficult to be effective in this role (and this approach is not rare though). There is a number of soft skills which are crucial in this profession, among which are those linked with personal characteristics: emotional intelligence, high intuition, stress resistance, willingness to help others, openness to other people, distance to yourself, quick adaptation, accuracy and precision, sensitivity.
Above-mentioned features are generally useful in life and they are also important in the profession of a Project Manager. They support significantly further development and learning of soft skills, like effective communication, flexibility, organization of work, time management, teamwork, empathy, critical thinking or conflict resolution. Soft skills support understanding of differences within the Team and smooth management of these differences. They allow to better react on problems and conflicts if they come up. Soft skills are very important in building Project Manager’s authority and the position as a leader within a Team, on whom its members can relay and who they will follow in the project.
With such an importance of soft side of managing project, I would say that this profession is not for everyone. The world of projects seems to be really exciting to deal with and the profession of Project Manager is well recognized and project managers are sought after on the labor market. However, without understanding how much this role is based on working with people and conscious assessment of possessed soft skills and willingness to develop them further, it is really difficult to be really successful in this profession and stay there longer.