Project Management Specialists

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Schedule baselining, resource-levelling, burndown charts and stakeholder status decks are structured data transformations that tools already do end-to-end, but chasing a vendor who missed a deliverable, running a tense change-control board, and reading the room in a steering committee are not — the 9 reflects roughly half the week being keystroke work inside Jira/MS Project and half being negotiation nobody has automated.

Fully desk- and screen-based. A 4 rather than 0 covers the site walks, factory or construction visits, and the physical war-room presence PMs use to verify what a status report claims, but the work is fundamentally laptop, calendar, and video-call.

No licence, no signature requirement. PMP, PMI-ACP and PRINCE2 are resume filters demanded by job postings, not licences — no statute reserves project management to a credential-holder, and when a program fails it is the sponsoring executive or the signing contract officer, not the PM, who carries legal or fiduciary exposure.

Some relationship component. Sponsors and functional leads do come to rely on a specific PM's read of which teams are actually on track, but PMs are rotated between programs, replaced at contract boundaries, and staffed from agencies routinely — the relationship is useful, not the product being purchased.

Meaningful discretion. At 13 you sit at the top of real discretion without owning the terminal call: you decide what goes on the risk register as red, which of three slipping workstreams to protect, and when to escalate — but scope cuts, budget reallocations and go/no-go on a $4M program get signed by the sponsor or steering committee.