What is the Employment Outlook for Project Management?

No matter what the category of a business may be, high-quality project management is essential for its lifespan. Even when the structure of a business is solid, the success of the business will ultimately come down to the quality of its project execution. All of the talents of the most valuable personnel in a business will be most cohesively executed with a competent project manager in place to properly coordinate them.

Project management is an occupation that is valuable in just about every category of business that there is, giving it a relatively healthy job outlook for the future. As more people across the nation began to invest in establishing their own businesses, the number of opportunities for project managers to exercise their skills will naturally remain generously abundant.

Job Growth

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that management occupations should grow by a rate of approximately 6 percent by the 2024. Should the Bureau's projections for job growth in the field proved to be accurate, then there could be a job change of as much as 505,000 new project managers within the next seven years.

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The basis for the projected job change in project managers by 2024, according to the BLS, will primarily be driven by the continued establishment of new organizations and the expansion of currently established organizations. As more businesses are established and expanded, there will need to be more managers in place in order to properly account for the higher volume in the workforce.

Median Annual Wage And Education

In May 2016, the median annual wage for all who held management occupations was approximately $100,000. Out of all of the major occupational groups surveyed by the BLS, management occupations were found to have the highest wage of them all. The average entry-level education of project managers is a bachelor's, though a number of management occupations can be acquired with a high school diploma.

Responsibilities

Different industries will oftentimes demand that project managers within them have a certain level of specialized familiarity with its unique requirements, though in all contexts, there are certain responsibilities that are generally seen across the board for project managers in all areas.

Project managers will oftentimes be one of the most important staff members on board in terms of the company's over-arcing goals. Through a careful consideration of what the top initiatives of the company are, project managers can make sure that all of the operations that a business carries out a consistently in-line with its top goals.

In many cases, project managers are deeply involved in the preparation of staff members in multiple departments for the demand of their tasks. Project managers may be responsible for directing and coordinating the training of new hires so that they are able to carry out their responsibilities in a manner that best facilitates the progress of the business towards its goals.

In addition to fulfilling a supervisory role in terms of training and goal setting, project managers will occasionally carry out performance analyses of the company in order to see where the biggest areas of improvement are. Based on the conclusions that project managers can determine from their analyses, future projects can be optimized to account for the weakest links in the chain.