When it comes to career development, it is easy to focus on the technical aspects of a particular role and easy to lose sight of the soft skills that are just as important, if not more so, in terms of performing your role successfully.
As someone who has conducted many interviews, the technical competency of a particular candidate is, of course important. For example, if I am interviewing you for a Project Manager role I want to know that you can write a Project Brief, perform Critical Path Analysis or compile Product Breakdown Structures etc. However, if you do have a development need in some of these areas, they can be fairly easily addressed with the wide range of training courses that are on offer.
What is equally important to me is whether you have the essential soft skills necessary to perform the role. You may be great at structuring a Risk Register or filling in a Gantt chart but can you make decisions effectively? How good are you at facilitating a requirements workshop? How well can you manage conflict and will you motivate and lead the project team successfully? These are the real skills that will help shortlist potential candidates for a role as they are often much more difficult to acquire than the technical areas of knowledge.
In other words, when it comes to career development, you need to make sure that you are developing in ALL areas of competency required for the role, not just the technical aspects.
For project managers, there are many soft skills that need to be displayed throughout the life of a project. Whilst some of those skills will be similar to an operational role, there are some crucial differences. For example, a Project Manager needs to manage and lead a team that has often been brought together quickly, involving individuals who have never worked together before and can sometimes have external organisations as part of the team structure. Within a project, there can be a lot of conflict that needs to be managed and a real focus on good communication and stakeholder engagement is required…
If you want to learn more about Rob Walters, soft skills and project management, or glean more of Rob’s full-length article, check out the original version from the June 2011 edition of Project Management Tipoffs, the project management & recruitment newsletter from Arras People. Subscribe to Tipoffs to receive this week’s July edition on Stakeholder Management and Workplace Politics free.
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