The future of project management isn’t just evolving – it’s accelerating. In this episode, we look ahead at what’s next for the profession and what it means for your career. With insights from PMI’s latest Salary Survey and Global Talent Gap Report, along with expert perspective from Dr. Kelly Heuer, this episode highlights where the greatest opportunities are emerging, how AI is reshaping the role, and the steps you can take now to stay competitive and grow with confidence.
Chapters
00:00 … Intro
02:52 … Shifts in Project Management Roles
05:04 … The New ECO for the PMP Exam
06:34 … Global Project Management Talent Gap Report
08:40 … The Impact of AI
09:50 … The Salary Survey and Upskilling
12:57 … The CAPM and Building Project Experience
16:17 … Early Career Mistakes
17:27 … Finding Project Opportunities
19:38 … Necessary PM Skills
21:50 … Impact of AI on PM Skills
25:26 … Most Overlooked Soft Skills
30:22 … The Compensation Conversation
35:01 … Continuous Learning and Development
37:18 … Find Out More
38:04 … Closing
Intro
KELLY HEUER: But the discipline and the practice and the motivation of recognizing continuous learning as essential and ongoing is the thing that is the ultimate future proof resilience skill. Even if everything changes, your ability to face up to a new challenge, embrace it as an opportunity for growth and learn the things that will help you be effective there is the most important muscle you can build.
WENDY GROUNDS: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast created by project managers for project managers. I am Wendy Grounds and in the studio with me is Bill Yates.
This year we’re celebrating 10 years of stories, tips, and real-world lessons from the front lines of project work. And we thank you once again for being part of our community. Don’t forget you can earn free PMI PDUs just by listening.
BILL YATES: At Velociteach, we’ve helped project managers earn their PMP certification for over 20 years. Our boot camps and OnDemand training are built around the same methodology behind the #1 PMP exam prep book, with more than 250,000 copies sold worldwide. If you’re serious about getting certified, do it before the exam changes. Visit velociteach.com to learn more.
WENDY GROUNDS: Let’s get started! Today’s episode is actually a follow-on to Episode 245, where we talked with Matt and Cindi Filer about today’s job market and the real challenges facing job seekers. Now, this time we’re joined by Dr. Kelly Heuer, who is the Vice President of Learning at PMI. And we are talking about the future of project management careers.
Kelly was previously the VP of Learning Experience at edX, which is a global online learning platform founded by Harvard and MIT; and she brings over 20 years in higher education, including launching Georgetown’s first M-O-O-C, MOOC, which is the Massive Open Online Course, and co-founding its Ethics and Social Innovation Lab. She has degrees from Harvard and Georgetown, and she mentors students and professionals pursuing new career paths.
BILL YATES: Kelly brings a front row view of where project management talent is growing the fastest, which industries, which roles are driving that demand, and why PMI’s Global Talent Gap Report projects the need for nearly 30 million new project professionals by 2035. That’s encouraging news. We’ll get into it.
If you’re wondering where the opportunities are, which skills are worth building next, and how to position yourself for what’s coming, we hope this conversation with Kelly will give you clarity and direction.
WENDY GROUNDS: Let’s get started. Kelly, welcome to Manage This. Thank you so much for joining us today.
KELLY HEUER: Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be here. Hi, Bill. Hi, Wendy.
Shifts in Project Management Roles
WENDY GROUNDS: So, we want to talk further on from our last conversation where we were talking just about job seeking in general, and get really more specific with you and talk about the PMI Salary Survey that was done. So, can you tell us about project management skills as they’re expanding so far beyond just traditional roles? They’re going into agile, change management, digital transformation, and all sorts of product-focused work. Where are you seeing project management talent grow the fastest right now? Which are the industries that are really driving that demand?
KELLY HEUER: It’s a great question, Wendy. And you named some of the key shifts that we’re really seeing in our ongoing research on the project professions, Core PM and others. A lot of the changes that we’re seeing in particular industries or growth in particular areas of specialization are really being driven by this broader global shift from within organizations towards project-driven work.
Projects are some of the main ways that organizations, regardless of industry, achieve strategy these days. It’s all about change. And that’s really – that really drives, I think, where we’re seeing some of the greatest growth and expansion. So, it’s in those areas where the industries are themselves subject to the greatest pressure to change and to pivot and to engage in strategic change initiatives, many of which of course are going to be led by members of our own community.
So, areas where digital transformation, product-led growth, right, you’re mentioning as well, product management delivery skills, platform delivery work, enterprise change initiatives, we’re seeing this most clearly in technology, healthcare, financial services. You know, but it’s really anywhere we’re modernizing operations or the customer experience is an area of rapid change. That’s where we see that expansion.
And we see that both in terms of the proliferation of roles that are, you know, forthrightly named as project management responsibilities. But we’re also just seeing that become more and more a part of the skill set and mindset that’s important to success, even in adjacent roles.
The New ECO for the PMP Exam
BILL YATES: Kelly, this is good. It’s interesting, too. This is consistent with what I’ve seen, even in the exam content outline for the PMP exam. I was just taking a close look last week at the change.
So here we are sitting in the first quarter of 2026, and there’s a new exam content outline. And the biggest shift when you look at it high level, you look at people process and the business strategy. Business strategy is becoming more amplified. It’s like, okay, project managers, your role is getting more strategic. For you to add more value to an organization, you need to really have that higher level view. And I think it’s reflected both, you know, in the statistics that you’re sharing, and even reflected in the exam content outline, that influences the PMP exam. There seems to be something going there, yeah.
KELLY HEUER: 100%; right? And the exam content outline for the PMP, you know, and for basically all of our professional certifications is also based on ongoing research. So of course we’re seeing that show up a number of different places. And you put it so beautifully, right, the role of project management is increasing in strategic importance because of its centrality to the way that organizations and industries are needing to transform themselves.
And so having that understanding of financial pressures and corporate strategy or, you know, nonprofit objectives, whatever particular industry you’re in, is so much more important to your success as a project manager than maybe it would have been, you know, 10, 20 years ago.
Global Project Management Talent Gap Report
WENDY GROUNDS: I want to talk a little bit about PMI’s Global Project Management Talent Gap Report. It projects that the need for project professionals by 2035 will be up to 30 million new project professionals. Can you tell us about that number and where that’s coming from?
KELLY HEUER: Yeah, you know, we as a global society need more project professionals because we are doing more projects across the board, across industries. There are management science professors and business school faculty who have researched this overall transition from a focus on operations and optimizing efficiency as a main way that businesses were able to drive success in the 20th Century. And that began to change towards the end of the 20th Century.
And we’re really seeing this strong pivot towards – across industries within organizations generally as a share of ongoing work, what companies spend their money on, what companies spend their time on, where they deploy their talent. It’s less operations; it’s more projects. You know, if you measure project-based work as a share of the global economy, according to our last estimate, it’s fully one-third of the global economy, and it’s growing faster than the rest of the global economy.
So, it’s really the expansion, the need for projects that’s driving what we call this talent gap, right, because there are not currently enough trained project professionals to fill that gap. That’s really pushing that need, and it all traces back to the importance of continuous transformation on a much faster scale than many organizations or operations needed to do before in certain industries. So that’s a major key driver, more specifically and more locally.
AI transformation is an important accelerator that may even change that number a little bit further, I think, that we’ve seen just over the course of the past few years. And, you know, unfortunately, crisis management, which is another form of change in project management, when we think about climate and displacement, that’s something that is driving that need within particular contexts, as well.
The Impact of AI
BILL YATES: That is good news, Kelly. It’s so interesting, too. You mentioned AI, machine learning and AI. For some project managers that are out there in our industry, there’s a lot of fear, and we’ll talk more about that. But there’s like, oh, you know, our jobs are going away, the profession is going to be impacted, and we see just the opposite. Obviously, we’ll talk about the need to embrace and learn and figure out how to use AI, maximize. But the reality is we need more people driving results. We need more project managers, and that’s good news.
KELLY HEUER: It is good news. I’m glad you brought that up. There are really interesting analyses on the daily tasks of project management and how many of them could be augmented or accelerated or, as you’re saying, taken over by AI.
There’s a Gartner analysis that made a lot of news a couple of years back saying up to 80% of the daily tasks of project managers can be done by AI. What does that mean specifically? Well, it can be broken down into the way that AI shows up in some of those tasks, but we’re very dialed into that. I’m excited to talk more about it. And we still stand behind the talent gap figures, right, because the need for project-driven work is so significant, that even in the age of AI we see it accelerating.
The Salary Survey and Upskilling
WENDY GROUNDS: PMI’s latest Salary Survey shows the impact of upskilling and credentials like the PMP. Now, what stands out most in the data about how these investments affect someone’s earning potential? So, can you tell us what you found on that?
KELLY HEUER: I would love to. The numbers tell a very positive story. So we, in addition to researching the way that the profession is changing, and the skills and capabilities that are most important, we’re also continuously looking at the ways that some of our own contributions to the profession, most notably the PMP exam, can serve as a signal to employers about the credibility, the trustworthiness, the effectiveness of project management professionals who opt to sit for the certification.
And when you actually just look at the numbers in terms of folks who’ve earned their PMP versus not, we surveyed 21 countries in our most recent survey, the 14th edition of our survey. PMP-certified professionals have 17% higher median salary than those who are other project managers who don’t hold the certification. And if we look broad-based here in the U.S., the median salary for PMP holders is around $135,000 a year, as opposed to around $109,000 for non-PMPs, which is a gap of almost 25%.
So especially when you consider how that differential in salary can compound over time, right, when most folks earn the PMP and then have that trajectory from there, it’s really significant. And the respect that the credential commands, is rewarded by hiring managers and organizations.
BILL YATES: Yeah, that is great news, Kelly. You know, one of the things that I hear from hiring managers is when I’m looking at candidates for project manager roles, if you have the PMP, you know, what does that mean? What does it not mean? That kind of thing. And I like what you said about that being a signal. It does show that somebody has been dedicated. Obviously, they’ve had to prepare for and pass a difficult exam that covers a lot of material and maybe exposes them to areas of the project management professional role that they’ve never done before.
So, it really is a great signal of, you know, this person is dedicated to their profession. They’re growing in it. You know, they’re probably having to continue to invest in training to stay on top of things. And they pass a difficult exam. So those are good signals.
KELLY HEUER: Yeah. Well, and you know what I like about it specifically, this is the 14th time we’ve done it, and we do find fairly consistent results over time. That’s exciting to me because it shows that additionally, right, what that means is for folks who’ve had experience hiring, working with, promoting people who have PMPs, they see the impact. Right. That’s not a pattern that’s going to persist if folks who hold the PMP aren’t actually delivering better. And so, I’d love to see that over time. It takes time to build up that signal of credibility.
Once a program is established like that, and you have enough positive reinforcement, it’s a little bit of a self-reinforcing loop. And I love the community of PMP holders that I think also kind of help mutually elevate over time as part of that dynamic, too.
The CAPM and Building Project Experience
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah. We may have some folk listening to us who aren’t quite there yet, not ready to get their PMP. And you know, students, recent grads, and career switchers, folk like that. Can you talk about some ways they could start building their project experience? And we haven’t really talked about the CAPM. Is that something beneficial that they should start off with?
KELLY HEUER: Oh, these are two really great questions. Maybe I’ll answer those questions in reverse order. So CAPM stands for Certified Associate Project Management. I’m a proud CAPM holder. This is more of an entry-level credential that we have at PMI. It’s not the PMP. There’s no requirement of prior experience. So, you can study for and sit for this exam without necessarily having held a formal title or managed a certain number of projects of particular scale beforehand.
It is absolutely meant to be that bridge for somebody who may have some experience, minimal experience, aiming to get a foothold. It is a knowledge and capability-based exam. It’s really focused on the fundamentals of vocabulary, concepts and best practices and managing projects from beginning to end along the spectrum from agile to predictive management.
I think this type of credential is extra important for our community right now because we were talking a little bit before about the disruptive force of AI across the board, across industries.
It makes it so that there’s a lot of need for change. So that’s great because that’s project-driven work, and we need project managers for it. One thing that the automation of certain entry level tasks is driving across industries is less hiring of junior entry level roles. This is impacting the project professions a little bit based on our research, but it’s happening across the board. And that means it can be harder to do the first part of your question, get in reps, self-leading projects, especially at a more junior level. And I think it’s so powerful that we are able to offer something that, speaking of employer signals, right, is a credential, is a certification.
You learn, and then we assess your knowledge and capabilities in this area. That’s a signal you can send as somebody who’s just getting started in the field, even without necessarily being able to have attained as many internships or, you know, really early kind of career stages just because that’s a trend we see accelerating across the board.
That being said, of course, there are still many, many, many ways that, even if you don’t have a project management title, right, even if you’re still looking for a job. You know, what are you filling your time with?
A project is just a time-bound initiative. It’s aiming at delivering something of value, changing something about things, the way things were before, producing something new.
So, Volunteer opportunities, putting on a school play is a project; right? You know, organizing a fundraiser in your community is a project. Doing a project in college for school is a project. And so, to the extent that you’re able to bring a project management mindset and skill set to driving that, and the CAPM can help you learn some of those fundamental principles, that can be a really valuable way of building experience, and then also being able to communicate that within the context of a hiring conversation.
Early Career Mistakes
WENDY GROUNDS: What’s a common mistake that you see early career professionals make when they’re trying to break into this industry?
KELLY HEUER: Probably the most common mistake I think is waiting to be picked or waiting for that formal title. It’s an issue with young professionals across the board that we, you know, try to address with coaching and mentoring. I think specifically it’s an interesting challenge, and one that I don’t think we need to suffer from in the project management field as much as we may in others because, as I was saying before, if most things are projects if you really put your mind to it, I think approaching any opportunity you have to lead a change initiative, to create something new, to organize and execute an event, you know, you can bring a really serious mindset and set of tools to that.
Identify it and run it like a project, and focus on the value that that project created. I think that’s a really, really valuable cycle.
And again, I think because of the proliferation of project-driven work, it’s more accessible maybe to our community than it is to others where you do need to wait to be picked or wait to be invested with a certain degree of title or authority to really start getting reps in.
Finding Project Opportunities
BILL YATES: That’s such good advice. This is one of those areas where you really do want to raise your hand, step up, say, “Hey, I think I can do that. Let me have the shot at this,” kind of thing. And I think there are opportunities that we have even outside of work. Sometimes the organizations that we work at have – they have volunteer opportunities, or just in your community you may see some. I’m thinking of Habitat for Humanity; or, you know, maybe your company puts on a fun run to raise money or raise awareness for a customer or something like that.
Even if I’m not leading it, if I’m able to be a part of that, then I’m able to see project management maybe from a different angle and pick up on things. So, you can start to kind of organically learn and see what are some best practices that I need to kind of bring into my vocabulary, and then maybe update my manager on things that I think I could be good at, too, even though I haven’t done it formally yet. You know, these are things that I see where I’m like, “I can do that. Let me jump in. Here’s what I’ve seen.”
KELLY HEUER: I’m so glad you’re calling that out because I do think it’s not just about doing more things, right, which is my recommendation, 1,000%. To the extent you can also find learning opportunities, you or different role models leading different types of projects in the wild, that’s super powerful.
And again, not to be like a doomster about AI and the digitization of everything, but this is also when I think about the younger generation, when I think about folks just starting out, this is another area. You know, AI is taking away a lot of really rote elementary tasks that we all started out doing the grunt work, and you do kind of learn a lot from it by exposure; right?
Also, as remote work proliferates, there’s also this loss of a lot of organic opportunities that we once upon a time had for observing other people at work. And so, you know, as leaders in organizations that need to be much more deliberate about designing those, but as folks who are starting out more junior level, you need to be so much more proactive about finding opportunities, exactly like you’re saying. To just look over somebody else’s shoulder, because it’s not going to fall in your lap maybe the same way that co-located working spaces maybe did for plenty of organizations and industries.
Necessary PM Skills
WENDY GROUNDS: Something you mentioned also which I picked up on was mentorship. I think it’s so important. Maybe find someone who is a project manager with lots of experience who could mentor you.
Looking at project management skills, some are really skills that will differentiate the candidates. So, if someone is applying for a job as a project manager, what are the skills that are really important in those hiring decisions?
KELLY HEUER: Great question. So, we were talking a little bit earlier in the conversation about how there has been this shift over time in the work of project management, and the skills that are relevant, and even what we test on the PMP, right, to incorporate more aspects of business acumen, business context sense, financial acumen and so on. So, I would say that’s a really interesting, under-invested, under-appreciated area.
Historically, our research shows this is under-invested. L&D teams don’t invest as much in business acumen skills as they do in other sorts of like power skills, soft skills, communication, or even some of the technical aspects of project management. But they’re hugely important to actually driving successful project outcomes. So that’s, I think, an unexpected answer to the question.
With that being said, we also cannot discount the importance of what we might think of as the fundamentals, the bread and butter of project management, technical skills of managing scope and schedule and budget on the one hand, and the very, very human skills like communication and collaboration, conflict management, et cetera. So unfortunately, I’m just telling you everything is super important; right? Except the stuff that you might not have been thinking about. That’s important, too. But that’s truly what we find; right?
The core foundation in a lot of the technical and human skills is non-negotiable. A differentiator will often tend to be, you know, you could get just ruled right out if you demonstrate yourself to be shaky on any of those fundamentals. But to differentiate yourself and get that much closer to advancement or to hiring that type of strategic thinking, sense of business context and other things we would bucket as business acumen is important as a differentiator.
Impact of AI on PM Skills
BILL YATES: Kelly, I was with a cohort last week that were in the healthcare medical device space; and we were talking about, again, the impact of AI on the skills that are most important for project managers. And we were kind of laughing and saying, hey, if I have two team members on my team that are, like, at each other’s throat, what good is AI going to do for me? You know, I’ve got to get in there, and it’s up to me and my emotional intelligence as a leader to try to work through different things. So, and, you know, trying to read the customer, trying to understand if they’re happy, what they’re concerned about, what risks are most important to them. There are so many nuances in there that, it’s part art, some of it’s art, some of it’s science.
And the science, absolutely, man. AI can help me with that, take some of that load off of me to free me up to be able to focus more on the customer and more on that relationship and the communication and more on the health of my team. And, you know, the healthier they are, the safer they feel with each other and with the customer, then the more productive they’re going to be, the more effective they’re going to be.
So, yeah, I’m with you. I think the skill sets that really set people apart, if I’m interviewing a potential project manager, and they tell me about, you know, some disaster that happened on a past project, and they stepped into it, and how they reacted to the customer, how they reacted to the team, then I’m really taking notes, and I feel like I’m getting to get a sense for what their leadership style is. And that makes a difference to me.
KELLY HEUER: You know, one of the things that we are finding and that gives me hope is that AI can really play an important role in that kind of like power skills, human skills, as well as business acumen space that supports and amplifies that strategic capability. I think it’s 100% true that there are a lot of things about, I don’t know, drafting the project charter to just doing the first pass of filling some of that in, doing a first couple of passes at timelines, right, the technical stuff, AI can really accelerate and, in some cases, do a bunch of that work with the expert project manager validating vetting, right, checking things that don’t make sense.
And I think, you know, a lot of the conversational LLM tools, as long as you’re using them in a safe capability or in a safe, you know, enterprise setup, we also find it can be a really valuable thought partner who absolutely cannot do the work, right, like you’re saying. I mean, it might help me like redraft that email that needs to be a little bit less spicy; right? But it can also be a safe thinking partner for a project manager who does have the responsibility of managing and leading this team, right, and doesn’t always have a lot of impartial folks to chat with about it. Help me think this through.
And I think in particular, when we think about business acumen, this is an area where I see AI is really helping to amplify and expand the strategic perspective that’s so important to project success these days.
Because I may not know a thing about the medical device industry. But if I’ve been assigned a project in a new area of the business, or I’m stepping up and into some area, you know, we find that having an understanding of industry trends, you know, the regulatory landscape, organizational strategy and incentives, those are things that can help project managers steer projects effectively in really complex changing business environments.
There’s no expectation that a project manager needs to know all of that stuff beforehand. But being able to learn enough of it quickly to be successful, that’s actually something many conversational alums are fairly well equipped to help you do. Right? Help me understand, how’s the CEO thinking about risks in this context? Of course, you need to vet it, but I love seeing it as an accelerant in some cases of those fundamentally human skills, as well.
Most Overlooked Soft Skills
WENDY GROUNDS: Now, we’ve talked about skills and capabilities, but let’s talk about the soft skills, which is always an important thing when people are applying for work and being considered for a job. Often, those are things that are really considered to be obvious, but HR hiring managers need to see them in action. So, what are the soft skills that are often overlooked by project managers? And how can they make them visible in this market?
KELLY HEUER: Yeah, it’s a great question. I’ll name a couple, and then I’ll tell you why I think these are often overlooked. I would define these as stakeholder influence, executive communication, including in some cases the visual display of quantitative information or restructuring information for different audiences, and something like adaptability under pressure. I say those all, and it’s like, yeah, of course you need to do those things to be an effective project manager.
In our research, both in terms of, like, community conversations, webinars, books, soft skills like team management, conflict negotiation, communication, we know those are bread and butter. They’re very in your face when you’re a project manager because you’re trying to manage team, and conflicts are cropping up.
How your project sits within a broader context and how it is perceived by important other stakeholders can be considered like it’s not always as obvious. So that’s why I would say some of those skills around executive communication, executive presence, stakeholder management, and stakeholder communication, I think they’re especially important now in rapidly changing environments when a lot of projects are more high stakes or more cross functional or more focused on organizational change.
And, you know, the perception of key stakeholders of your project being on track versus not, delivering value versus not, and in particular, when it pivots, and so you’re like, well, we’re technically – we changed the scope, we changed the scope again, we changed the scope ahead, we would be behind according to the original timeline; right? It takes a lot to communicate that effectively, and also to make sure you’re genuinely tacking against the right organizational pressures around you.
And so, I think those are the types of soft skills when we think about what the community most needs support in or where we’re investing time in research, it falls into those basic categories where not as much has been done or written or produced, but they are increasingly important to your actual success in project-driven work.
BILL YATES: Yeah, that’s so good. And I think again, this goes right along with that, that increased focus on business strategy and that kind of a higher view of the role of project manager. When you’re talking about executive presence and executive communication, we had the chance to do some training with a partner with JP Morgan Chase, and it was for program managers. And these were really high-level, high performers that were in the first cohort in particular, and then we continued to roll it out. And I remember one of the pieces I was not presenting on, it was more on executive presence than the program management piece.
And there was, as the presentation was playing out, then we had a CIO within the organization, within JPMC, who spoke to the program managers and said, look, I came up through your ranks. I was in this role before. Here are some of the products that I helped release. The role I’m in now, let me give you a sense for what it looks like when you come into my office.
And it was such a good – so everybody’s like, as soon as he walked in the room, everybody’s like, oh my gosh, you know, they’re sitting up straight because they recognize him and his role. So, when he’s speaking to them about, if you have 15 minutes with me, here’s what my day looks like. It was so good.
The takeaway for me was, the more I mature in my role as a project manager or program manager, the more I need to think about my customer, the more I need to think about senior management and try to put myself in their shoes and see what’s most important to them.
So, I love it that you brought up some of these key differentiators that I think PMs overlook also. I think it’s a bit of an eye-opener of, oh, well, I thought I was supposed to do this as a project manager. Yeah, those are table stakes. You know, let’s think at a higher level. Think about what they really need from you.
KELLY HEUER: I think it helps build empathy, too. I mean, I just relate to that in my profession, as well. I remember seeing these out-of-touch executives and being like, why aren’t they like this; right? But then when you flip it around as you’re describing this experience, you see it. But what is your day like? How much context do you have? What do you care about? What are the three things you need to know to make a decision? And it’s not obvious always; right?
But there are resources out on that, and it will make you so much more effective in what you’re able to identify, whoever the stakeholder is. They care about what they’re motivated by, what they don’t know, what they already know; right? And you filter accordingly.
BILL YATES: Right.
The Compensation Conversation
WENDY GROUNDS: One of the things we did talk to Cindi Filer and Matt Filer about was compensation, and when not to ask, “What is my salary going to be?” But what is your advice on this? Just some ways that a person can proactively navigate that conversation about their compensation when they’re looking to increase their role.
KELLY HEUER: Yeah. Ah, it’s a great question. You know, I think there are a couple of things I would recommend. So, one, we were talking about the salary survey before. Within the project professions, we have a global survey about what folks are paid in different roles. So that’s really useful for industry benchmarking; right? To be able to take that into conversations. If you believe you’re being undercompensated, and you can validate that with market data. Amazing; right? We literally have a published vetted research report on this.
Also, if you’re part of a community of project managers, that can also be great in getting more localized slices in your region, in your industry and so on. You know, if everyone’s brave enough to have the compensation conversation with one another, that can also help you with that sense of what’s fair to ask for or what’s out of bounds, you know, in a particular context.
So that’s sort of external inputs; right? Approaching the conversation about compensation internally though. If you don’t have those external data points that are building your case, you need an internal case, as well. And I think very often it can be really easy to approach that conversation with the sense of, look how hard I work, look how well I met all my milestones, look how long I’ve been in this position. Don’t I deserve to be recognized? And that may be morally true, but that is not persuasive to HR or to global talent or to your boss.
What you need to do is tell the story about how your contributions drove significant impact and value according to the way your organization or your team defines value, which may be revenue, or it may be organizational structural impact. It may be outcomes for volunteers. I mean, it may vary, but you need to give the business case about how the organization invests a certain amount of money in you for your salary. You deliver way more than that; right?
And it doesn’t have to be quantitative exactly, but the more you can be speaking the language of your business or of your business unit, the more effective that case is going to be for why you should be compensated for the value you’re delivering, and the organization should be investing and not losing you in your contributions.
BILL YATES: That’s so good. Great advice. And I think for project managers, they usually know the KPI. They usually know the key metrics in their projects that they’re being judged by. So, you know what they are. Track them the same way we’re supposed to capture our lessons learned at the end of a project. Personally, I should be kind of throwing those into my résumé, so to speak. It may not be published anywhere; but it’s like, okay, next time I have a conversation about compensation, these are key metrics that mattered in my project. And here’s how we did.
And I’m big on quotes. I love if a customer ever, you know, sent a letter – I remember one time getting a letter from a customer. This is back when I was doing actual project management and not training. And that letter, it was phenomenal. You know, it was kind of out of the blue. We’d had a long up-and-down project. And at the end she sent this amazing letter. And, you know, it was on their letterhead and everything from the big telco. And I’m like, man, this is awesome. I’m going to keep a few copies of this. This will come in handy.
So, if you have, whether it’s an email or an IM message or something formal like a letter, capture that. Those things resonate, because it’s not you speaking about yourself as, well, you know, here’s what Theresa said, or here’s what the VP of Finance said from this department.
KELLY HEUER: It’s so smart to capture that, you know, the KPIs and then also that external validation over time, right, and not just when performance review cycle or when you’re thinking about transitions. As a friend of mine who does this, she saves it all in like an email folder, and she calls it her “smile folder” because it’s not just useful for when you need to have these conversations. You’re like, don’t take it from me. Look what this customer said about me.
But it’s also project management is not easy; right? We’re talking about everything keeps changing, and the scope and the goalposts keep moving, and it could be tough. It could be tough. And oftentimes you feel like the only sane person. Sometimes you need a smile, and it can be to go look at validation of the impact you’ve had on other people or of your work as well.
BILL YATES: No, that’s great. Yeah, we need that. We need that. We all have those days where our projects just grind us to the ground. So, yeah, we need those.
Continuous Learning and Development
WENDY GROUNDS: Kelly, this has been so good and so helpful. Do you have some final words of advice for our project managers who are just trying to stay relevant?
KELLY HEUER: I definitely do, which is – so we’ve talked so much about how everything’s changing. Right? And how projects are the way the world is changing. But also, the ways that we do projects keeps changing because of AI and because of, you know, the erosion of the early rungs of the career ladder and so on. The increasing importance of business acumen, which is not an area that many of us are laser focused on per se, A, as we’re starting out in any career; and, B, historically for project manager. It’s a lot.
And my closing kind of thoughts about that are really that continuous learning and development through career pivots, through upskilling, through learning the latest tech, the latest AI model and so on, it is table stakes. It is table stakes. It’s also a phenomenal engine of resilience.
And anything you learn now, it may be relevant in one to seven years. It may be less relevant more quickly than it’s been historically. But the discipline and the practice and the motivation of recognizing continuous learning as essential and ongoing is the thing that is the ultimate future proof resilience skill. Even if everything changes, your ability to face up to a new challenge, embrace it as an opportunity for growth and learn the things that will help you be effective there is the most important muscle you can build. And it will help you here. It will help you if you change careers. It will help you if you change careers seven times and the world changes around us.
And I will also say one of the best ways to engage in that continuous learning is in community. It gets you accountability partners, it gives you opportunities for mentorship, as you were saying before, Wendy. And so, you know, embrace career-long learning as an imperative, but also an opportunity, and a muscle to build. And remember that you’re not doing it alone. And it actually can be inspiring and fun, especially when you’re thinking about doing it with others.
BILL YATES: Great advice. That’s so good, Kelly. Yeah, just staying curious is so important.
Find Out More
WENDY GROUNDS: If our audience wants to find out more, where can they get in touch?
KELLY HEUER: Oh, well, please, head on over to PMI.org. That’s where you can find out so much more information about the CAPM and the PMP and some of those free courses in AI and other skills. That’s a great launch pad there. And that’s also a place where you can find opportunities to connect with project management professionals or project professionals in general in your area to lean into the community that really is all around us, as I was mentioning before.
BILL YATES: Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for sharing very encouraging news. We like to hear salary surveys and that kind of thing and where things are going. And just the perspectives that you bring are very valuable to our audience. So, thank you for sharing.
KELLY HEUER: Total pleasure, thank you both so much.
Closing
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s a wrap for today on Manage This. Thank you for hanging out with us, and the best part, you’ve just earned free PDUs for listening. Head over to Velociteach.com, click Manage This Podcast at the top, hit Claim PDUs, and follow the simple steps.
We’ll be back soon with more stories, tips, and strategies to help you level up your project management game. Until then, stay curious, stay inspired, and keep tuning in to Manage This.
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