What is AI doing to the sustainability of our profession???

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by Richard Maltzman, Dave Shirley

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In this post I would like to talk about sustainability, but not in the sense of planting trees, saving whales, reducing or capturing carbon, or recycling plastics.

The focus in this post is on the root of sustainability – “sustain”.

The post was triggered by Ricardo Vargas’ post today - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-senior-project-manager-2035-ricardo-viana-vargas-ph-d--dxpze/
The thing to “sustain” in this case, is our own career of project management – although, I increasingly push for a name change to project leadership.

Ricardo discusses the impact of AI on junior or entry-level project managers. As a “pracademic’ – one who has had a 40-year career in industry and a parallel 30-year career as an instructor of project management curricula, I have seen literally thousands of young project managers go through exactly the same ‘rungs’ as Ricardo describes in his post. I highly recommend you interrupt your reading of this post and come back to it after reading his. I say this realizing that I may lose many of you because his post is just that good!
If I still have you here, and I hope I do, here are the main three points of his post:

1. The first rung is missing
Ricardo talks about the project management career as a sequence. I'm used to "career path" (or - as the name he used implies - a ladder) but I think he's right in making this subtle differentiation. “You did the administrative work, you were exposed to real projects while the stakes for your mistakes were low, somebody noticed you were reliable, and you were handed something slightly harder. Take away the first stage and the sequence does not start. There is no obvious replacement for it, because the first stage was never designed. It was a by-product.”

2. The seniorization trap
Junior roles are not vanishing quietly. Many of them are being rewritten.
Ricardo points out, and I know this because I advocate for my graduating PM students, “Entry-level positions now ask for stakeholder management, business judgment, executive communication and the ability to challenge a plan.” Ricardo points out that these are normally senior attributes, gained through human expertise and experience.

3. The bill arrives in 2035
Ricardo goes on to make what I would call the “long-term thinking” (sustainability!) argument. He points out that the use of AI to replace basic planning and scheduling results in ‘instant gratification’. There are immediate and visible monetary benefits if AI ‘replaces’ planning and scheduling tasks. But the cost is not eliminated. It is deferred – and as Ricardo says, The bill arrives in 2035 – when, probably, someone other than those decision-makers are forced to deal with it.

I agree with 94.775% of what Ricardo says, and I particularly love this quote:
“Judgment is pattern recognition built out of consequence.”

He does have one statement with which I take some umbrage, perhaps it is ego or defensiveness on my part.
“…judgment is not information, and it is not something a classroom transfers.”

I agree with the first part – 'judgment is not information'. This is the whole basis of applying critical thinking in your conversations (and I hope they are conversations, not 'google-like searches'). AI can provide you with outputs (information) but it’s up to the human expertise and experience to make judgments. It’s that second part, ‘not something that a classroom transfers’ that bothers me. If we’re talking about one classroom, and the classroom is a classical one-way lecture, sure, this is true. But good training and knowledge transfer takes place in a sequence of courses and experiences. And those courses – if they’re mine – are NOT classical one-way lectures, they are sketches and skits and building model football stadiums and planning pizza parties in groups.
This is what a good project management (or should I say, project leadership) program conveys. And this is where I think we agree 100%.

Ricardo goes on to talk about what PMOs and organizations should do to sustain project management (LEADERSHIP!) for the coming decades as AI continues to permeate the world (the world of work as well as the broader world).

I highly recommend you read his entire list but I highlight one, since I am in the business of developing and teaching project leadership courses:

Make the learning explicit — We used to get it as a by-product and never had to design it. Now it has to be designed: rotation, shadowing, decision reviews, structured post-mortems where the junior presents and defends.
This has been my mantra, whether it was as an internal trainer or coordinator of training programs in industry, or now as I plan curricula and run (very interactive) courses in project leadership. Make the learning as real as possible and explicit.

Think of it this way: I ‘m trying to reduce that bill you will receive in 2035. Perhaps you are in a PMO or Center of Excellence. Perhaps you are a Portfolio Manager, or a mentor for several younger project leaders. If you are in a position to affect how the career path for project managers is shaped in your organization, take heed of Ricardo’s important message – it will help sustain your organization and project management itself.

Posted by Richard Maltzman on: September 15, 2026 09:42 PM | Permalink

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What is AI doing to the sustainability of our profession???

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