If you want to get hired for your next role in project management, what can you do to prove your project management skills will meet the needs of the organisation? There’s no doubt, project management skills create a solid career foundation for thousands of successful professionals and sit at the heart of many businesses. People in operational, technical and engineering roles often find themselves managing schedules and budgets, and before you know it, they become accidental project managers too. (What do we mean? Read more on the linked article.) In this blog we’re going to explore:
- Why project management skills are important
- What the top skills are which hiring managers look for
- Which training courses help you develop those skills
- How to build project management skills beyond classroom training
- What is happening to cause the skills gap
- How you can get ahead by accelerating your leadership style and soft skills
After an APM research study reported that 83% of project professionals in UK SMEs say their employer needs to improve project skills across the workforce, we felt it was important to highlight what we’re seeing on site. First up: what skills really matter for project managers today?
Why do project management skills matter more than ever?
The UK’s infrastructure is continually evolving in many sectors, including energy, water, transport – thousands of people working on major projects to deliver change for future. These projects are complex, capital-intensive, and contract-driven. Whether you’re delivering a new piece of infrastructure, designing for engineering or rolling out a digital transformation, success depends on having people with the right project management skills.
If those skills are lacking, what’s the outcome? Projects that might look “green” on the dashboard but are bleeding cash. Stakeholder tensions that derail timelines. Opportunities lost because collaborations or variations aren’t spotted early enough. Everything moves faster and the expectations for efficient project delivery are higher than ever.
What are the top skills needed on projects?
So, what skills does the UK job market demand? APM’s research across 1,000s of project professionals highlights what they named as the top skills:
- Team management (17%)
- Leadership (15%)
- Communication and interpersonal skills (15%)
- Adaptability/flexibility (14%)
Talking to the Operations Directors among our clients, this overlaps with what we’ve noted. When hiring project professionals, they’re looking for the following skills:
- Leadership and team management
- Stakeholder communication and influence
- Commercial awareness and risk management
- Project scheduling and planning tools
- Adaptability and problem solving
In practice, leadership and team management means the ability to step up and co-ordinate people who you aren’t directly line-managing. As a project manager (PM), the skill is to motivate, guide, and hold people accountable for the milestones.
On your CV, you’ll want to show evidence of leading cross-functional or global multi-disciplinary teams and give examples of the results you achieved. Being specific will grab their attention: “Led a team of 25 multi-location engineers to deliver a £10m EPC project ahead of schedule.”
On site, you might be well-versed in listening, team building and great communication. We call that leading with a campfire mentality. (What do we mean by this? Read more via the link). Yet again you can prove it with evidence from 360 degree reviews: “Received 95% positive team feedback for the weekly Project Management Office bulletins.”
You’re not just reporting progress—you’re shaping outcomes. Having great communication skills mean influencing decision-makers, handling conflict with diplomacy and ensuring stakeholders stay aligned when priorities shift. PMI’s Pulse of the Profession 2023 found that 68% of project professionals ranked communication as the single most critical “power skill.” If you can’t manage the conversation, the project is likely to steal your sleep.
Risks and issues are another factor which can create stress. But it’s one thing to manage them at project level, and a different skill entirely to have the commercial awareness to anticipate what else will affect your contract. Many PMs know the schedule inside out yet can’t confidently protect margins or spot commercial opportunities in variations or weigh the risks against financial impact. Especially in engineering procurement construction (EPC) projects, commercial awareness is survival.
For project planning and scheduling, tools matter, but mindset matters more. A skilled PM doesn’t just input tasks into Primavera or MS Project, they build resilient schedules with contingencies and spot dependency risks before they hit. They also know how to optimise resources across competing demands. Hiring managers want evidence of outcomes, not just software familiarity. “Used Primavera” is less powerful than “Recovered a slipping £20m programme by re-sequencing activities.” It does make a difference to your CV if you know several different project tools, so make sure you mention them, including the internal apps you’re using. We take a look at the best project management software for engineering projects here.
Finally, projects change—and the PM must too. Adaptability is the difference between panic and composure when the unexpected happens. APM data shows adaptability/flexibility is up there with the most important skills, chosen by 14% of professionals in the study mentioned above. Great PMs aren’t defined by flawless plans, but by how they recover from setbacks. So again, if you’ve navigated major hurdles, summarise them briefly on your CV or prepare for that inevitable interview question, “What’s been your biggest challenge and how did you overcome it?” There’s more on what we think makes a great project manager here.
Which courses provide foundation knowledge for those skills?
Qualifications like APM PMQ, PRINCE2, and PMI PMP are invaluable. They give you structure, vocabulary, and credibility. But they don’t prepare you for every reality.
What qualifications teach well:
- Frameworks and governance.
- Principles, practices, processes and tools.
- Risk identification and analysis.
- Stakeholder mapping and reporting.
What’s missing or lightly covered:
- Commercial awareness or negotiating scope changes and variations.
- Protecting profit margins in commercial contracts.
- Communication with challenging stakeholders.
- Leading under pressure with incomplete information.
Many PMs find themselves recapping the theory by night and firefighting by day. They’re forced to learn on-the-job and look for their own mentors among the teams they work in. If you’re trained in engineering and have moved into managing projects, the IET offers a broader range of courses that cover Project Management Techniques, Commercial Awareness and Negotiation.
What experience on projects helps develop those skills?
Training offers knowledge. However, experience helps PMs develop their skills beyond the classroom. Project managers need both hard technical skills and soft interpersonal skills, but the balance is shifting. Hard skills include working on scheduling, budgeting, critical path analysis, procurement, and risk frameworks. They’re measurable and trainable yet working on site will teach a PM how to rely on their instincts and bring in their soft skills.
The soft skills are becoming known as the ‘power’ skills such as communication, negotiation, leadership, emotional intelligence, and adaptability. PMI calls them “power skills” because they have a disproportionate impact on delivery. A dashboard can tell you the project is late—but only a conversation will win stakeholder buy-in for the recovery plan. In the UK, hiring managers increasingly prioritise evidence of strong soft skills as the differentiators between candidates.
Which skills are in short supply and are needed for the future?
Project complexity has exploded, which has contributed to the skills gap. There’s been an over-reliance on formal qualifications which has contributed to the skills gap, because the soft skills aren’t included in much depth. The human and commercial skills needed in practice include things like negotiation, influence, and real-world contract management. This leaves new PMs technically qualified but underprepared for the messy realities of being on site.
As projects evolve, so do the required skills. Looking ahead, project professionals will need to develop:
- Digital fluency: using AI-assisted dashboards, predictive analytics, automation.
- Sustainability literacy: meeting carbon reduction goals.
- Hybrid leadership: managing distributed teams across multi-discipline teams and locations.
- Emotional intelligence: showing resilience, deep empathy, and solid calm under pressure.
- Continuous learning: lifelong skill-building instead of one-off certificates or qualifications.
PMI’s global survey highlights these “future skills” as the differentiators between average and outstanding project managers. However, we think emotional intelligence is the one that will create the most differentiation – because mental wellbeing at work is critical for business success.
How to build your project management skills
If you’re wondering how to develop your own project management skills, think of building them in layers:
- Formal qualifications (APM PMQ, PRINCE2, PMI PMP) for frameworks.
- Self-directed learning: books, podcasts, LinkedIn Learning.
- Mentoring: learn from someone who’s faced the challenges before.
- On-the-job reflection: every project is a classroom if you capture lessons learned.
- Supplementary programmes like ours: Pathfinder for individuals, Base Camp for teams and project leaders.
Start with a self-audit: where are your strongest skills? Where do you consistently feel out of your depth? Which job experiences are causing you to learn more? Then choose the next step that will stretch you.
Project management isn’t just about plans and dashboards. It’s also about people, decisions, and resilience under pressure. The skills that employers value most – communication, adaptability, leadership, commercial awareness – are also the ones most often lacking.
Qualifications are a foundation. But the leap from “qualified” to “trusted” project manager comes from building the skills which textbooks can’t teach.
If you’re recently qualified or studying for your project qualifications, Pathfinder is here to help you bridge the gap. And if you’re leading without enough commercial cover, Base Camp can give your team the mentoring to keep projects on track. Book a call if you’re interested in hearing more.