Skills Needed for Project Management

By Dr. Glenda Holcomb  |  06/08/2026

There is often misunderstanding around the skills needed for project managers. These skills typically fall into four different categories:

• Critical skills – core execution skills 
• Major skills – structured governance skills
• Significant skills – strategic and interpersonal skills
• Minor skills – polish-enhancing skills

The best managers utilize all of these skills. Although all of these skills can be considered essential project management skills, the importance of major and significant skills increases project exposure to high-level managers as projects scale and their complexity grows.

Critical Project Management Skills

Critical skills are the hard skills considered non-negotiable for delivering successful projects. These project management skills form the foundation for planning and creating work products that define a project and determine the level of its success.

Critical skills and processes encompass:

• Stakeholder management and communication
• Project goals
• Team member roles
• Updates
• Outcomes

Exceptional communication skills are vital to a project manager. Miscommunication is common when working with other people and is a key factor in project failure.

Major Skills Needed for Managing Complex Projects

Major skills are the essential project management skills that elevate performance and predictability, leading to project success. Work products designed under the planning and scope management phases of the project’s lifecycle are used to track and control the baselines of:

• Cost
• Schedule
• Resources
• Quality

Change control and issue escalation are fundamental processes that project managers use to govern a project and make decisions for trade-offs and value delivery. 

Significant Strategic Skills That Improve Project Outcomes

Project managers use significant skills to differentiate and improve the outcomes and adaptability within the project. These significant skills are also useful in tailoring and managing stakeholder expectations.

These significant skills involve:

• Collaborative leadership
• Business and contracting acumen for the project and organization
• Critical thinking

These skills are focused on:

• Making project decisions
• Creating overall project value
• Aligning vendors
• Developing project release strategies
• Identifying improvement initiatives for all processes

The use of significant skills can shorten project timelines and increase efficiency. In addition, they can cement organizational culture for the development team.

Additional Minor Skills That Strengthen Project Leadership

Minor skills (usually considered soft skills) enable project managers to heighten situational awareness and understand the nuances of the project environment from planning to closure. Tool selection, technical literacy, facilitation/process improvement, and project management software skills enable a manager to discuss issues without having to be an expert. Proficiency with project management software is a must-have technical skill for project managers in today’s world.

Hard and Soft Skills for Project Managers

Hard and soft skills are important project management skills essential for any project manager to meet project goals. The best project managers use leadership skills (soft skills) and technical skills (hard skills) to build teams and lead a project to successful delivery.

Integrated with strong communication skills, the successful delivery of all project goals and objectives are drastically increased through the use of hard and soft skills. Without applying project management skills, a project’s failure is almost assured.

How Project Management Skills Work Together

Successful project managers blend the critical, major, significant, and minor skills to reinforce one another as projects scale. To mature to a high-performing project manager, however, project managers need to increase their skills in each category to become a force multiplier in future and complex projects.

Stakeholder management, adaptability to change, and communications skills are soft skills that involve decision-making, prioritization, leadership, and facilitation. Establishing a culture of trust through communication aids the manager in balancing various concepts, requirements, demands, and constraints from both common and powerful stakeholders.

Aligning the agendas of primary decision makers leads to properly managing projects and prioritizing project needs that require immediate attention. Collaboration within teams, across teams, and with experts should be a key component of all project manager skills. 

Planning and scope management directly influences a project’s scheduling, dependency, management, execution, and delivery, as well as potential risks and the production of project plans. A well-defined scope and work breakdown structure (WBS) creates realistic schedules and enables dependency matrices that meet project objectives and expectations.

These project elements drive day-to-day execution plans, change control, and baseline protection. However, if a project manager is weak in certain skills, that creates schedule drag, scope creep, and extra work for team members, which can negatively impact morale. Effective project managers use project plans to develop strategies for problem-solving and overseeing software development. 

Risk Management

Risk management is an essential component of any project. However, risk identification, analysis, and mitigation steps depend on:

• Stakeholder insights
• Scope clarity
• Measures visibility

Risk management is essential for a project manager to actively mitigate any negative results to a project through:

• Trade-off analyses
• Reprioritization of needs
• Escalation to more senior organization management for potential added resources
• Changes to basic schedules and costs

Time Management, Budgeting, and Cost Control

Time management is one of the highest risks to be managed over the project lifecycle. It is all too easy for one or more team members to fall behind on project deliverables, which can adversely affect delivery deadlines.

Budgeting and cost control are integral to governance, compliance, and change management for the project manager. A project manager’s ability to allocate capital and operational expenditures is fundamental to the organization and the project. This approach helps ensure that projects align with regulations and laws and pass required audits.

To maintain integrity and trust for individual and team performance, every project schedule or scope change must go through a change management and control process to maintain forecasts and baselines. Any compromise in these skills leads to project failure in areas such as:

• Budget
• Cost
• Schedule
• Delivery
• Requirements
• Needs

Familiarization with technical and project management tools enables a project manager to ask the right questions, assess project health, and share best practices with other project managers. Common tools used in project management require an understanding of:

• Software
• Gantt charts
• Review boards
• Day-to-day burn rates

Integral to the successful delivery of project value is resource and capacity management. A project manager is responsible for managing:

• Resources
• Schedules
• Dependencies 
• Vendors
• Contracts

Having the right skills at the right time is directly tied to project performance.

Negotiation and influence enable a project manager to align stakeholders, secure resources, and drive consensus by effectively balancing interests and guiding decisions toward the best project outcomes. A project manager’s ability to persuade others is strongest when it is tied to validated business outcomes, verified measures/metrics, and data insights that support decisions and trade-offs best suited to specific project needs.

Continuous improvement and the analysis of lessons learned from a project build project cultures for collaboration, technical and reporting tools, and documentation for all areas of an organization. Skilled project managers create a “lessons learned” session at major project milestones and during the closure of the project. 

Building Key Project Management Skills

For project managers, it is difficult to become fully proficient in all of the required skills without practical experience. The best path to attaining these skills starts with project management exposure. As project managers gain more exposure and experience, they will learn about all the required skill sets needed to deliver successful projects and acquire more knowledge from constructive feedback.

Project managers must achieve some level of emotional intelligence to manage other employees. Understanding your own emotional stability and having empathy for others’ life situations is complex. However, developing emotional intelligence builds trust and can improve team performance.

Other ways to build skills include:

• Networking with peers at industry events
• Seeking mentors and leadership coaches in the industry
• Acquiring professional certifications

Certifications for Project Managers

For project managers, certifications validate expertise and enhance credibility. Ideally, a successful project manager should have more than one certification to fulfill the role. Some of these certifications include:

• Project Management Professional (PMP)® – considered the gold standard for experienced project managers
• Google® Project Management Professional – tailored to beginners in the project management field
• Certified Scrum Master® and Certified Scrum Professional® – validates expertise in Agile frameworks
• Projects IN Controlled Environments® (PRINCE)2 Foundation and PRINCE2 Practitioner – geared toward government-focused projects

Note: Additional education, specific training, a specified number of work hours in a specialized area, and/or specific certifications may be required to be eligible for the certifications listed. It is important to check the requirements needed to be eligible to earn or sit for the listed certifications.

Ultimately, a project manager has the responsibility, authority, and accountability for all actions taken on a project. To successfully lead a project and bring it to completion, great project managers integrate execution, governance, strategy, and people management skills through data, risk, and influence.

They enable projects to stay adaptable, aligned, and auditable as the complexity of projects grows. These project managers apply critical thinking skills, their problem-solving abilities, and conflict resolution skills to not only deliver value to organizations, but also to deliver that value faster, cheaper, and better. 

The Bachelor of Arts in Management at APU

For students interested in developing their project management skills, communication, critical thinking, and other managerial skills, American Public University (APU) offers an online Bachelor of Arts in Management. For this degree program, students can enroll in courses such as management communications, management ethics, organizational behavior, and supply chain management. Other courses include strategic management, employment and labor relations, and management information systems.

This B.A. in management includes eight concentrations so that adult learners can choose the concentration courses best suited to their professional goals. The business project management concentration may be of particular interest for students seeking a project management role in the future.

This program has received specialty accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP). This accreditation ensures that this program has been meticulously examined to adhere to high academic standards.

For more details, visit APU’s business and management degree program page.

Project Management Professional (PMP) is a registered trademark of Project Management Institute, Inc.

Google is a registered trademark of Google, LLC.

Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Professional are registered trademarks of Scrum Alliance, Inc.

PRINCE2 Foundation and PRINCE2 Practitioner are registered trademarks of PeopleCert Group.