September 21 2023 at 06:00AM
Attention! Is There a Way Out?
Photo 1. Confused? (Taken from Freepix)
Lets take a step back and imagine where we are....in a post- pandemics world where chaos has already made its way in our business life and daily activities.
Think about yourself for a moment: You start fresh in the morning at the office, open your calendar to look at your activities for the rest of the day, and oh my, did I open Pandora’s box? Now think about yourself in the evening: feeling lost and struggled all day to find yourself stuck between project activities, demanding customer requirements, objectives and key results, emerging technological hypes and trends, stakeholder expectations, shareholder risk appetites, disagreements or disputes between team members, project success criteria, No, ....please, ...stop! Does all that sound even a bit familiar to you?
Lets keep it aside for a moment to discover something of importance for all of us. This time we need to have a look at insights over “Future of Jobs Report 2023” of World Economic Forum published on May. Table 1 indicates the core skills for 2023.
Table 1. Core skills for workers 2023
Have you noticed something? First five core skills are all soft skills that every worker has to improve if they want to stay up to date.
And you know what? It wasn’t any different from the first “The Future of Jobs” report published in Jan, 2016 by WEF (Table 2). They were denominated as cognitive skills and they have always been there. Have we improved them as individuals thus far (Please stop for a few seconds and refresh your memories)? Do you think these skills will not be needed anymore? (Also please think over a few seconds more)
Table 2. Core skills for workers 2016
Seems like for the last seven years, cognitive abilities were priorities for everyone. So what does that mean for project management practitioners? Now lets return back where we left in the first section: confused project team member in a standart work day.
During a regular work day on as project management practitioners, we have several tasks to do, meetings to realize, project status to update and report. Looking at the “future of jobs” facts of the previous section this simply means, we all need to focus on reskilling or upskilling ourselves and our teams on our most precious skill set: PMI practitioners have already known it as Leadership skills and now as Power Skills of the PMI Talent Triangle®
Photo 2. PMI Talent Triangle® (Taken from PMI.org)
What are these “Power Skills”? Interpersonal skills, conflict management, coaching and mentoring, influencing, emotional intelligence, problem solving, team building, listening, negotiation, teamwork. They are all cognitive skills and you can add many more just as WEF has been doing.
On the other hand, upskilling these skills is not a paved road but a rough path with many obstacles as well as ups and downs offering many conditions until the finish lane. Even during each project we need to upskill and/or reskill ourselves and team members and spend time over them.
Photo 3. Road to finish lane (RevKMR)
Moreover, bear in mind, this will be a continuous journey and you need to improve power skills at every occasion possible if you want to stay alive in a technology driven world. On the other hand, there is no one-recipe-fits-all, depending on your eagerness to learn and adapt. Just start small and implement one at a time.
What are your thoughts about over this subject. You’re more than welcome to share ideas and spread the word.
