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Carrying on from my last article about career development opportunities for the coming year, let’s talk about something else you can build into your development plans: enhancing your competencies and key skills.
The first challenge when you come to work on skill development is to work out which ones are worthy of your time. Well, the good news is that many skills overlap. I did a survey recently on important skills for project managers and shared the results on LinkedIn. The comments pointed out that the ‘leadership’ skill was actually a collection of other skills. Other commentators said that it shouldn’t be a skill by itself at all. So truly for project managers, there are so many skills we use every day that it really doesn’t matter which ones you choose to work on. You will get benefit from developing any of them. As long as you aren’t already a super expert in that field with nothing to learn!
Here are some I think that it’s worth leaning into this year.
Problem-solving
Had any problems recently? It seems to be never-ending problems right now, am I right? I don’t know if it’s the time of year or whether it’s simply a sign that work is getting more complex, but there is never a shortage of problems to sort out.
Build your problem solving skills by learning different techniques for group facilitation, conflict resolution, root cause analysis and group decision making. Then you’ll have a toolbox of tactics to draw from whenever you hit a snag in the project.
Prompt engineering
Prompt engineering is the art of being able to ask AI for something and getting back a good quality result. When it comes to generative AI, it’s really important to be able to get the right kind of output, otherwise the exercise is not worth it – the results are too generic.
Use the PMI course in prompt engineering as a starting point and then if you want to take it further look into other resources and courses to help you develop good skills. Be aware that the AI field is developing really quickly so I would tend to rely on training videos, webinars and online materials over books simply due to the pace of change (and I say that as an author myself).
Communication
Communication is an old favourite skill, but it’s certainly one we can all do more to improve. The type of communication we use these days is also different. For example, it’s a lot more online, asynchronous communication, mediated through technology like messaging apps and collaboration tools. Which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it is a skill. And if you want to make yourself understood, then this is where I would be putting my time and effort, especially if you work virtually a lot of the time.
These are just three of the many skills you could focus on this year, and of course you could focus on all of them. If you are serious about professional development, you could choose several, or even one a month to give you a broad boost across many areas. Maybe brainstorm a few topics that you’d like to learn more about this year and plan some time across the months to make sure you have focus development time set aside.
We’re project managers, it shouldn’t be too difficult to block out time in the diary for development! However, I know that real life and projects get in the way, which is all the more reason to block out time now so you have it ready when you need it.
Posted on: February 11, 2025 09:00 AM |
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