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 we want to be effective in this role, it requires profound knowledge and competences, especially soft ones.
Whether every Project Manager can be an effective in his work is a question I asked myself some time ago, having worked in this profession for several years now. I followed statistics which said that only about 10% of Project Managers, active on the labor market, are successful in this role. I discussed with colleagues who were looking for Project Managers to join their teams. They often stressed that it is not easy to find the right candidate. Sometimes, only during the interview, it was obvious that a candidate is not suitable, even if they had professional certificates in the field of project management. It also happened that after a successful recruitment interview, first months of work showed that the promising candidate was not suitable for the role, being only theoretically prepared to fulfill it.
Often, the reason for that is the fact that in this profession acquiring knowledge and the necessary hard skills is not enough. Taking a course, completing specialized postgraduate studies, obtaining one or more certificates is important and sometimes even necessary. This is how market looks like and these are the requirements formulated towards candidates.
There is no doubt that knowledge in the field of project management, incl. project management tools is important. However, this is not enough. Next to the knowledge, which can be gained on different courses, 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. Project Manager is responsible for a project, including difficulties which may happen during its performance, also for recognizing and managing project stakeholders. 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).
In terms of learning, soft skills in project management are more challenging than technical ones. The key reason behind this is the fact, that the level of possessing high soft skills is linked with personal characteristics like e. g. 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.