Soft Skills Training for Project Management – harder than you might think!

This event explored the soft skills that enable project and programme managers to be effective in their leadership. Marion Thomas, experienced PM, speaker, certified coach, ChPP mentor, and trainer in leadership, led a discussion on the non-technical skills that differentiate the great project managers.

Soft skills are the capability that helps us engage our team and manage our stakeholders. Our people and leadership skills are like the oil that makes the ‘cogs’ of our technical training move and work together smoothly. And there is nothing soft about them. These skills can be hard to acquire and even more challenging to put into practice.

So what are the soft skills that elevate a project manager’s performance and how do we learn them?

This event explored soft skills for project management and encouraged participants to share their experience.

Benefits of attending – learn and network

Marion has very kindly allowed her presented material to be made available for viewing. The slides on Slideshare are now available in our APM resources area and also embedded below for reference.

Speaker:
Marion Thomas – Director, ExtraordinaryPM

Marion has spent 30 years as a freelance project/programme manager working across a wide range of industries (proving just how transferrable PM skills are). She’s usually called in when a business knows what it wants to achieve but doesn’t know how to get there, or when things have gone a ‘bit off the rails” and help is needed.

Having become known for getting 20% more from her team, she developed a framework that puts people and leadership at the heart of project management and complements the more traditional/technical PM methodologies.

She founded ExtraordinaryPM in 2016 and now trains and mentors other PMs to be more successful, feel more fulfilled, prioritise their well-being, and, most importantly, become great leaders.

She also mentors ChPP applicants and provides consultancy and training to a variety of clients requiring help with leadership and other PM skills.

She is a Chartered Project Professional, a Fellow of the Association for Project Management, regularly speaks for both APM and PMI, and is a certified coach. ExtraordinaryPM was an APM award finalist in 2020.