What are the IT skills required for a Project Management Career?

Anyone interested in a new career will examine the training, qualifications and skills needed to work in these areas. Here we will look at Project careers. So what IT skills are required for a career in Project Management? Project management requires organisational skills, time management, coordination and the ability to control a Project’s progress. This means that a lot of project work will need data analysis, data manipulation, presentation skills and the ability to communicate effectively. Project Managers will require extensive IT skills to keep up with the requirements of their careers. We will focus primarily on Microsoft Office programs, but numerous programs can also be outside Microsoft’s scope.

Project Management Skills and Requirements

Communication is an essential part of Project Management. This means the engagement and involvement of stakeholders is required. In particular, key stakeholders must be informed of the progress of significant issues inside a Project. Generally, most project communications with key stakeholders are likely to be based on PowerPoint. Therefore, advanced skills in PowerPoint are essential for a Project Manager. You may find a requirement to show flowcharts and flow diagrams concerning your projects. This could mean that you need Microsoft Visio skills. You may also want to create images and diagrams from non-Microsoft products like Canva and similar programs.

IT skills required for a Project Management Career

There will likely be a lot of big data, analysing data and similar processes. This means that many project workers will need to work with Microsoft Excel. Excel is a go-to tool for data manipulation, analysis, and presentation. This works hand-in-hand with PowerPoint, as you export charts and diagrams from Excel to PowerPoint. It is the powerPoint presentation often with Excel Objects that you will show to your key stakeholders. We offer an Excel for Project Management Diploma, which is entirely CPD Accredited.

Power BI and Excel for Projects

If you are trying to develop dashboards and summaries that often complement Microsoft Excel is Power BI. This growing system is becoming very popular in all types of business. Therefore, Project Managers could also consider learning Power BI to improve their ability to present management summaries and dashboards for coordination and control of the Project.

Naturally, there is a lot of scheduling of your diaries, managing emails and organisation requirements. This means knowledge of Outlook could be useful for a Project Manager. This will apply to Project Assistants and Project Support Officers, who work more in the administration of the Project. However, there are more Project specific ways that you may want to plan your Project Lifecycle.

Microsoft Project

Project Management software is likely to be fundamental to your ability to deliver. This means that Microsoft Project is the most suitable Microsoft program for Project Management. It enables you to create timelines and charts, create budgets, control the budgets, monitor risks and present project-specific visualisations to key stakeholders. Project enables you to deal with many elements of Projects and, as the name suggests Microsoft Project is designed for many of a Project Manager’s IT needs. It is worth noting that there are lots of Project Management software on the market. Major names like Trello, Monday.com, Asana, Oracle and many others offer a range of project management software.

Collaborative working

Finally, a lot of information is often shared on your internal network. This means that quite a lot of Project Managers are needing to understand how to use SharePoint effectively because it is an ideal collaboration tool. Also, you are likely to do a lot of virtual meetings via Teams and Office 365 is the base where all of these programs exist. Therefore, Office 365,  Teams and SharePoint are areas that you may want to build your knowledge on as well.

We have CPD-accredited courses in the majority of the Microsoft products discussed above. You can find the Microsoft Project Courses page if interested in this product. However, we offer Excel SharePoint Office 365 and many other programs.