What Are Top Skills That Are Considered Essential For Project Managers Today?

If you are thinking about doing a masters in project management or any such similar course, chances are that you are already invested in the career path. You might also be aware of the many advantages of choosing a project management career path such as the diversity of roles available to you.

Now that you’re sure of your wish to become a project manager, you should be aware of the immense competition in this space. Hundreds of colleges and MBA institutions churn out project management graduates every year who fight it out to be in the top administrative and managerial roles in leading MNCs.

Hence, you should look into developing an extensive set of project management skills which can set you apart from your competitors. Have an arsenal of skills at your disposal will also make you good at your job and make professional success as a project manager easy.

But what are the top project management skills today? And how do you develop them? Let’s find out!

Most important skills for project managers today

While career opportunities are abundant for aspiring project managers, they need to put in effort to develop requisite skills that allow them to be capable of handling large-scale projects.

Here are the top project management skills that employers consider a necessity for budding project managers.

1. Excellent communication skills: Project managers are often involved in a lot of business communications like stakeholder meetings or project reports. Therefore, they need strong written and oral communication skills.
2. Strong negotiation skills: Leading a project to execution involves negotiating timelines and resources with a lot of parties including senior management and vendors. Hence, project managers need to be skilful at corporate negotiations. 
3. Efficient time management and scheduling skills: Deciding project timelines and scheduling functions is a key aspect of project management. Naturally, you should be adept at time management and multi-tasking as a capable project manager.
4. Excellent leadership skills: Ensuring a project is delivered on time requires a project manager to regularly check-in with the teammates and motivate them to complete their work on time. Therefore, project managers need to be natural leaders.
5. Technical expertise in specific domain: As a project manager, you should not only have managerial expertise but you should also have the technical know-how to push the project towards completion.

How can you develop appropriate skills for a project management role?

Most of these skills fall under transferable skills and can be acquired easily if you work in a business management space. However, you might still have to learn about the latest project management methodologies and agile techniques which might require you to keep an eye out for the latest project management trends.

An easy way out would be to invest in a comprehensive project management programme that can take you all this and more. Such a course can also help you develop the relevant skills that employers look for in project managers today.

Start looking for appropriate project management courses from reputed colleges in Dublin today to become an accomplished project manager in the future.