A project leader is the head of a team responsible for carrying out an enterprise. Projects vary, depending on the type of business or industry they are a part of, but project leaders have some essential common denominators across different disciplines.
They are professionals who stick around until the job is done. Their job is not only to make the team do what the project needs, but to make them want to do it. They meet with other leaders on a regular basis and monitor the progress of their projects.
Essentially project leaders are held accountable if the project fails. This is a complex and high-pressure role for people who know what they are doing. Or at least this is what we assume, based on their generous salary, which ranges somewhere between $93,000 and $140,000 annually.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a project leader. For example, did you know that they make an average of $42.3 an hour? That's $87,987 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 9% and produce 56,000 job opportunities across the U.S.
There are certain skills that many project leaders have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed analytical skills, communication skills and creativity.
When it comes to the most important skills required to be a project leader, we found that a lot of resumes listed 28.0% of project leaders included project management, while 13.9% of resumes included procedures, and 5.1% of resumes included business process. Hard skills like these are helpful to have when it comes to performing essential job responsibilities.
When it comes to searching for a job, many search for a key term or phrase. Instead, it might be more helpful to search by industry, as you might be missing jobs that you never thought about in industries that you didn't even think offered positions related to the project leader job title. But what industry to start with? Most project leaders actually find jobs in the technology and finance industries.
If you're interested in becoming a project leader, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 50.4% of project leaders have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 31.3% of project leaders have master's degrees. Even though most project leaders have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a project leader. When we researched the most common majors for a project leader, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or master's degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on project leader resumes include associate degree degrees or doctoral degree degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a project leader. In fact, many project leader jobs require experience in a role such as senior software engineer. Meanwhile, many project leaders also have previous career experience in roles such as software engineer or programmer analyst.