The Future-Proof PM: 8 Skills to Master for Career Stability

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Career Development   Leadership  

If you got into project management because you thought it would be a safe, secure and job steady, forget it. (To be fair, no job meets that criteria). As a matter of fact, the next five years are starting to look “interesting,” so hold onto your hats.

As usual, tech is moving more quickly than the professional titles can keep up with, so organizations constantly change how work gets done. And yet, project managers are still supposed to juggle everything, keep it on the rails, and nod their respective heads with an empty smile as they attend the grind of daily meetings.

So what skills will actually make a difference in the future? Surprise, surprise—it’s not learning the “Wow!” tool or the “Fantastic!” product or other iterations of new and improved techno-stuff. The skills you’ll need will be about developing a set of capabilities that help you navigate constant change without losing your sanity (or your credibility).

Here are five crucial ones…

1. Strategic Thinking (Having a View of the Bigger Picture)
Back in the day, if you were a good project manager and stayed in your lane, you would be rewarded. That was then, this is now. Those lanes are now moving fast on the highway, merging with other lanes—and often without a turn signal to provide any degree of warning.

The organizations of today …

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