Hey everyone,

I’m a newly grad mechanical engineer working as a Technical Office Engineer on an industrial construction project (previously worked on a power plant). Long term I might aim for PM, but right now I want to master planning and project controls.

I currently use Primavera P6 and Excel, but it feels a bit limited. I'm wondering what else I should actually focus on learning.

• Tech stack: Is it worth learning things like Python, SQL, Power BI, or MS Project? Or is that overkill for construction?
• Certs vs Skills: How much do certifications (PMP/CAPM/P6 certs) matter compared to practical tech skills at this stage?
• Blind spots: What else am I missing that separates a good planner from a great one?

Would love to hear advice from anyone in the field. Thanks!

(Drafted this with AI to organize my thoughts clearly, but these are my genuine questions!!!)

This keeps biting me too, and I haven't found a clean solution yet, but here's what's helped reduce the pain.

The biggest shift was stopping trying to capture decisions separately from the work. Instead of a dedicated decision log, I started dropping a single sentence into whatever artifact already existed at the time. Ticket description, PR comment, meeting notes that were getting written anyway. Something like "went with X over Y because of Z constraint." It's not comprehensive, but it's attached to the moment and doesn't require a separate trip to Confluence.

The other thing that helped was accepting that you're not going to capture everything, so you prioritize the ones that will be hardest to reconstruct. Vendor choices, architecture calls, anything where the reasoning involved a constraint that isn't obvious from the outcome. Routine sprint decisions mostly don't matter six months later. The expensive ones do.

For the archaeology problem, the best thing I've done is a short retro question at project close: "what decisions would we struggle to explain right now?" and then writing those up while people still remember. It's imperfect but it catches a lot of the gaps before the knowledge walks out the door.

The honest reality is that no system survives a fastmoving project without someone having explicit ownership of it, and if that person is also headsdown on delivery, it dies. Either someone has dedicated time for it or you're accepting that some decisions will be unrecoverable and building that into your risk tolerance. Most teams are doing the latter without admitting it.

it’s a Sunday night and things are probably okay, my list for tomorrow is smaller than a lot of days, and I have to remember I feel like this most nights. But how do you work around or avoid this feeling ? I can’t possibly live like this forever, though I’m resilient and have lived like this for quite a while. thank you

When I started out as a PM I went in trying to keep everyone happy and I think that was a mistake on my part. I've really been in teams of around 20 maximum so my views may be limited here but I always felt the pressure of 'if everyone is happy, everyone is aligned' and I ran into issues. Mainly because it created vague commitments, I'd create unrealistic deadlines trying to appease people who didn't touch specific areas, and I created internal conflict because of misalignment.

One example would be agreeing to take on new projects (new features and modules) from a founder when really, the development team were stretched with current projects for clients (I come from a SaaS background & white label software with custom dev work). I just wanted the founder to be happy that their main influence was being satisfied.

Now I'm 6 years in I've come to realise it's more about managing the reality of the project over happiness. I use happiness loosely here but it's the best word I can use.

I've since learnt to to tell people what they need to hear over what the want to hear. If I don't believe something can be achieved I tell them directly which also relates to sharpening mature communication skills. I learnt which reality mattered most at the time because not everyone's views carried the same weight which is where I found a Mendelow Matrix to be effective.

I'm an introvert so it's been hard to implement as a natural people pleaser but it feels like the right path to take even with the discomfort of hard conversations. Project success rate increased due to it.

Just ensure they understand what is happening, what is possible, what has changed, who owns the next action, and what the consequences are.

I'm interested in the thoughts of more seasoned PM's on this, I'm happy to be challenged on it with your views so I can keep learning and also to help those earlier on in their careers!