When senior leaders hire project managers, they don’t prioritise technical skills. They rank communication and stakeholder management first, by a wide margin.
PMI’s 2025 Pulse of the Profession report surveyed almost 3,000 project professionals and 587 senior leaders. When those leaders were asked what they actually look for when hiring, strong communication (84%) and stakeholder management and engagement (77%) topped the list. Technical skills came in at 31%. Financial acumen at 23%.
That’s not a small gap. It’s a complete reordering of what “good at the job” means.
The plan is rarely what fails
Ask any project manager why a well-planned initiative collapsed and you’ll rarely hear “the plan was wrong.” You’ll hear about the finance director who wasn’t consulted, the regional lead who found out third-hand, or the sponsor who went quiet the moment things got difficult.
PMI’s data backs this up from the other direction too. When a project goes off scope, over budget or behind schedule, up to 94% of project professionals say stakeholder management is the skill that gets it back on track, ahead of scope management, budget management and every other lever in the toolkit.
Technical planning gets the training budget. Influence and negotiation usually don’t. That’s backwards.
Two skills, one gap
The data points to two capabilities that separate people who handle this well from people who don’t.
The first is stakeholder management itself: understanding who has influence, what they care about, and how to keep them engaged before they become a problem rather than after. This isn’t a register you fill in once at project kickoff. It’s an active, ongoing skill, especially with stakeholders outside your direct authority or outside the organisation altogether.
The second is the ability to respond well under pressure. Being properly consulted counts for little if, when the difficult question lands in a meeting, the answer is muddled, defensive or three minutes too long. Every project runs through people who didn’t ask to be involved and most of the moments that matter with them happen without warning: a corridor conversation, a challenge in a steering group, a question you didn’t prep for.
Neither skill is a personality trait. Both can be learnt and both are best built through practice rather than templates or theory.
What this looks like in practice
Our Stakeholder Engagement (including AI-Powered Simulation)™ workshop is built around this exact gap. It helps people understand, engage with, and manage stakeholders at different levels, both inside and outside the organisation. So that they develop relationship management skills that hold up when a stakeholder group becomes difficult or complex. Rather than talking through frameworks, participants work through realistic AI-simulated scenarios before they’re in a conversation that actually matters.
Think on Your Feet® addresses the second half of the gap: the ability to respond confidently and concisely in formal, informal and ad-hoc situations, especially when you’re caught on the spot. It trains people to analyse, organise and present their thinking fast, condensing complex ideas and handling tough questions without overloading the listener or losing the room.
Together, they cover both sides of what PMI’s data actually shows determines whether a project succeeds: managing people and holding your own when they push back.
The takeaway
If your organisation is investing training budget primarily in technical and process skills, the evidence suggests you’re optimising for the wrong 31%. The skills that senior leaders actually hire for, and the skills that get projects back on track when they wobble, are stakeholder management and communication under pressure.
They’re learnable. They just need to be trained deliberately, not assumed.
Find out more about Stakeholder Engagement (including Simulation)™ and Think on Your Feet®.
