3 Skills Every Project Manager Needs To Survive 2024

Avid Learning

To stay relevant and maintain a competitive edge in the job market requires you to keep abreast of current industry trends, changes in the market, new technologies, and best practices in project management. When you demonstrate eagerness to learn and continue your professional development and training while in your role, you position yourself in a favorable light to your employer, become more efficient in your work, and develop and refine your soft and hard skills such as budgeting, risk management, and leadership

While continuous learning such as that obtained through a PMP certification or similar is ideal, there are many other ways to advance your training and professional development. For example, you could decide to ask your employer to allow you to work on a range of programs or projects which are slightly outside your expertise or comfort zone, so you can sharpen your skills and refine your areas of improvement.

Adaptability

Being flexible and adaptable is crucial to your success as a project manager. Projects seldom run smoothly, and this is even more the case now as we roll into the new year, with new AI-driven technologies being developed and implemented almost every day. You will need to adjust your approach to accommodate for the use of new technology, and also, considering how volatile markets have been since the pandemic, prepare for the worst case scenarios.

You also need to be ready, at a moment’s notice, to re-evaluate your approach at the demands of stakeholders, navigate complex organizational structures and environments, and learn from your mistakes so you can adjust where necessary.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is becoming wildly popular as a strategy to reduce time and risk in work processes—and for good reason; tools that are deployed by artificial intelligence can help project managers become more confident decision-makers and carry out their roles more efficiently, because of the access to data and insights that were previously unavailable or difficult to obtain. You can now save time on many routine tasks, develop project schedules and plans, create slide decks, presentations, and contracts, map out your personal workload, and even record stakeholder meetings and obtain notes and summaries of follow-up action items from meetings, with AI-powered software.

This is definitely a skill you need in your arsenal, as it will free you up to do more creative problem-solving and actually enjoy your job more. With just a little research, you can easily discover free and paid AI productivity tools to enhance your work, streamline communication between cross-functional teams, and even provide you with more accurate forecasting.