Building essential skills for the next generation of Project Professionals

I’m Robin Carter-Evans, the Education Outreach Manager for APM and today is World Youth Skills day, which is pretty well timed as it lines up with the start of our second year with the SkillsBuilder Partnership.*

This is an organisation that is trying to help make a unified skills language that goes from schools right up into professions. We have worked with them for the past year, and absolutely champion their approach to skills, particularly within our school’s outreach.

We are currently in the process of getting our Education Outreach resources accredited by them; to reflect their quality and the meaningful impact they have for students.

SkillsBuilder describe their skills as the non-technical skills needed for any employment, above basics like maths and English, but below the very technical layer that all jobs have. However for the Project Profession, they actually blur some of those lines, being able to write a Gannt Chart is not there, but “I use planning tools to organise complex projects” is!

Their eight essential skills are Listening, Speaking, Creativity, Problem Solving, Adapting, Planning, Leadership and Teamwork. They each break down past the ‘title’ to have steps that help you from learning through to mastery.

I’m sure you could make an argument for all eight of those to be vital for Project Professionals, however we have picked five that we think are the most needed.

Listening:

• Asking open questions to understand more.
• Comparing different points of view
• Using questions to challenge perspectives

Adapting:

• Responding calmly when faced with challenge
• Helping others see opportunities when faced with challenges
• Identifying potential risks and actively manage them

Leadership:

• Managing team time and resources to complete tasks
• Structuring group discussions
• Using a range of approaches to motivate others

Planning:

• Ordering and prioritising tasks to achieve a goal
• Creating plans with clear targets to measure success
• Seeking out a range of views to improve plans

Problem Solving:

• Identifying advantages and disadvantages of potential solutions
• Choosing between possible solutions based on success criteria
• Identifying how parts of a system impact each other.

Focussing on essential skills is such a great of helping young people, rather than just ‘self-promoting’ your own job or company. When you consider the situation that our young people find themselves in in the UK, with over 1million young people already NEET (not in employment, education or training), and with this number expected to grow.

We as a profession have a responsibility to help tackle this crisis, and if we can provide meaningful learning opportunities that help students learn key skills, then we can have real, lasting impacts on those students’ lives!

If you’re interested in learning more, or volunteering in schools and or Universities, please contact [email protected]

Download the latest APM Skills Survey 2026

Redefining project management skills for a fast-moving landscape
Research report in association with YouGov

* The Skills Builder Universal Framework is the world’s leading tool for measuring and building essential skills. It breaks the 8 essential skills down into a sequence of steps, starting with absolute beginner through to mastery.

It's completely open source, and backed by years of research. Developed with leading businesses, academics and educators, it consolidates the array of different frameworks into something comprehensive and practical.

It's truly universal. That’s why it’s used by over 950 employers, schools and social impact organisations across the globe.