One Job to Rule Them All!

80% of project management work will be taken over by AI by 2030.  

While this Gartner finding sounds ominous, you should read the sentence again to see that it is saying work (or tasks) and not jobs. Project Managers will need to adjust and deal with new technologies for sure but the demand for someone to be responsible and lead teams to completion on time and under budget will only grow.

 For the last 8 years I have been working in the IT recruiting sector. One of the hottest roles in that time has been (and continues to be) Project Manager.

The more jobs I came across and the more I learned about what a PM does, the more suspicious I became that the skills of a Project Manager are likely useful for many other jobs as well (thus the title to this article). So I tried a little Google experiment, "Do _____ jobs need project management skills?" filling in the blank with multiple job titles. After getting positive responses in the search results indicating that Sales, Finance, Marketing and Human Resources all benefit from project management skills, I tried ChatGPT asking, "What are the top 5 jobs that do NOT need project management skills?". ChatGPT quickly gave me the following list: Retail Cashier, Truck Driver, Customer Support Representative, Factory Worker, Receptionist. 

As the Headhunter Dad, albeit a little older and with children who are no longer toddlers, I wanted to see what project management related skills we could supply our kids with early on to give them a leg up on the increasingly competitive international job market. I know from my own experience interviewing recent college graduates for positions such as recruiter, sales, or marketing how good a successful project looks on a resume. It shows me that they can take responsibility, most likely they dealt with problems and solved them, they led a team, had some organizational skills and attention to detail, were probably a bit cross-functional, and so on. Exciting things to see on a resume for any job.

Rather than just go with my gut on project manager skills, I reached out to my good friend Google again and came up with a basic top 10 list thanks to an article on the Bright Network website:

• Communication
• Collaboration
• Problem Solving
• Adaptability
• Negotiation
• Time Management
• Organizational Skills
• Patience
• Leadership
• Scheduling

Frequent readers of the Headhunter Dad articles will likely have a sense of deja vu looking at this list. The highlighted and linked skills are all ones we have discussed in the past. However, this is the first time I have seen so many of them bundled together under one job title.

The Harvard Business Review has a list of "next generation" skills they believe will be required of Project Managers. While I do not disagree with this list, I get the impression that HBR cannot allow themselves to just agree with the perfectly good list above and needs to impress the rest of us with their high level of thinking. I doubt there is a single item from the above list that any PM would give up to gain one from the HBR list.

• Organizational Awareness
• Data Acumen
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Decision Making
• Willingness to explore and adopt new technology
• Financial Acumen
• Process and Framework Expertise
• Customer Centricity
• Growth Mindset
• Ability to Coach and Motivate Teams

Not to be outdone, Forbes had this to say:

The project management industry is witnessing unprecedented growth, and is set to increase in demand over the next few years, with a predicted 25 million needed to fill the gap across various industries globally. Some of the most popular sectors with opportunities for project managers include technology, construction, manufacturing, and finance.

Recognizing that Project Managers will be in demand is all well and good but let's get back to the value of project management experience and the relevant attributes of a Project Manager for helping our kids to become more marketable and competitive in their job search. As mentioned, we have covered several of the attributes individually in other articles (Communication, Collaboration, Problem Solving, Negotiation, Time Management, Patience, and Leadership) so rather, how can we give our children actual project management experience?

I like starting with definitions. For this one I used a tool I have come to rely on, Perplexity. I asked for a simple definition of "project".

A sequence of tasks with a specific objective, clear start and end dates, and defined resources and constraints

Bringing this framework to our kids can be done without any major adjustments to everyday, chaotic, childrearing life. A little guidance to a typical chore will do the trick. "Clean up your room please." (a specific objective) can be followed with clear start and end times, "Now! and get it finished before you go out to play." Resources can be supplied such as reminding your son where the vacuum cleaner is and constraints such as having to do it himself. So far not so different We just need one last bit, helping our young cleaner to organize his work. I am a proponent of making people think for themselves and I believe this helps our kids to grow into confident adults if they are able to solve their own problems from a young age so in this case ask, "What are you going to work on first? When that is done, what is next?"

Napoleon Hill said that "Any idea, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought." If you can apply project management thinking to the various activities of your kids lives on a regular or even semi-regular basis they will start to internalize it. Do it yourself as well and while you are at it explain what you are doing to your daughter. She may ignore you or nod and go back to her games but kids listen to and absorb what is going on around them. Keep at it! Any child with a habit of breaking out tasks for a project and recognizing deadlines will have a headstart in school all the way through college and will be in a good position to present themselves competitively for any job. Who knows, these skills are so important that maybe not too far in the future our elementary schools will be preaching the education of reading, writing, arithmetic... and project management.