Industry experience... it is a requirement we encounter on a daily basis. It’s so commonplace that most don’t stop to consider why a project manager actually needs prior experience to work in a specific industry. We believe that boils down to a misunderstanding of what the job of a project manager truly is.
Many clients see their project manager as their “get out of jail free” card. The resource who can hotfix any issue themselves. But, at the most fundamental level, a good project manager is there to define a specific problem for the client, offer them solutions to that problem, then deliver whichever course is chosen by the client. The fine-grain details of that solution are carried out by more specialised resources.
The skills that will decide how effective a project manager is at those fundamental tasks have nothing to do with industry experience. They rely on problem solving, creativity, communication, and people skills.
Those skills rarely come across through a CV, or even an interview, when the focus is on past experience. We need to shift toward more meaningful metrics, like how they’ve identified and solved problems in the past, rather than just ‘years worked at X’.