Are You Keeping Pace With the PM Skills of the Future?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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A disclaimer before I start this article: The research I am basing this piece on was produced by LinkedIn Learning and was associated with a campaign in September 2022 to drive learner engagement. One of my courses was included in that campaign. Now that the campaign itself is over, I feel comfortable writing about their findings.

LinkedIn Learning conducted research into how the skills needed for people to be successful have changed in recent years (you can read a summary here). It chose 2015 as the baseline and determined that the skills people need have changed 25% between then and now, with an expected total change of 41% by 2025. That’s a pretty dramatic shift—and for project management, it’s even more significant with a 70% change to date.

I could take exception to some of the specifics listed, largely because they make no distinction between different types of project management (hence why construction was included on the 2015 version of the list). But ultimately, this is based on an analysis of LinkedIn profiles for project managers, so the sample size is significant. And without getting too hung up on specific skills, I think we can all agree that project management has changed—and continues to change.

My concern is that many of us haven’t fully acknowledged the scale of the change—and as a result, we aren’t …

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