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This article is more about Devry "offerings" than must have skills.

They've been telling us these things for years, but whenever I look at a project management or communications curriculum, I see nothing but hot air. And the whole people management stuff is not well founded either. I read about a study recently which showed that the pseudo psychology applied by HR managers is not significantly better at selecting job candidates than a random a selection.

I know project management is hard. I know conflict management and communications is hard to do right. Risk management is hard. Motivating people is hard. There is a huge difference between a good and a bad manager. But not much of that is down to anything you can teach in a course. These training companies want to make you believe they do something useful but they don't. It's a complete farce. I have yet to meet a single competent manager who learned his skills in a training course like that.

They throw these courses after everybody, not just IT people. But have you ever seen a job add that asks for a project management certificate? I haven't. And the reason is that things like project management have to be learned by being part of projects and taking on additional responsibilities over time. Sure you can learn the vocabulary. You can learn what a milestone or a critical path is. But the hard thing is to estimate how much time a particular task takes and how likely it is to take longer.