Enhancement in hard skills will only help the project manager improves his construction technology knowledge and copes with technological changes in construction industry.
As the soft skills are not taught beforehand in any collage or university, most of the project manager familiar with and emphasizes the hard skills aspects of project management. Besides that, it has became customary for someone with technical skills in one of the construction and building disciplines to be appointed as project manager (Abdul Samad, 1999). .
Project manager who neglects soft skills in his practice of project management most probably would not manage his project effectively. Also, project manager who overemphasizes hard skills would bring disaster to the project. A project manager is not expected as an expert in every technical aspect but at least he has the knowledge on the project's technical part. After all, human factors still the number one problem in project management.
1.2 PROBLEM STATEMENT.
"In Malaysia, most project managers are technical-oriented and they emphasize more on technical aspect of project management. The soft skills have been neglected and compromised at the expense of technical discipline specialty." (Abdul Samad, 1999).
"To be an effective and efficient project manager, does the ideal combination consist of 20 percent technical (hard) skills and 80 percent management (soft) skills or, is it a combination of 30/70, 40/60 or even 50/50 that constitutes the ideal?" (Tan, 1997).
From the statements above, it could be said that both hard skills and soft skills are fundamental and important in managing the project but not contradictory. Hence a project manager needs to acquire both skills in practice of project management.
The main problems of this dissertation are:.
(a) How much percentage of hard skills and soft skills does a project manager should possess?.
(b) What are the effective ways of developing the skills needed to be a project manager?.
