Core Skills for Facility Managers

World FM Day is a day to acknowledge and celebrate the achievements and contributions of facilities managers around the world. Celebrated on the 9^th of May in 2024, the theme for World FM Day is Igniting Your Career in FM.  

While everyone’s journey in facilities management is different, there are some core skills that experts in the industry share. In our Insights of the Industry series, we asked expert facilities managers what skills they think are instrumental for a successful career in FM.

Communication and collaboration

In every edition of Insights of the Industry, communication is a central theme. An ability to communicate within the team, with facility users and other stakeholders is critical to success in facilities management.

Property and Procurement Manager for Brightwater Care Group, Ray Breen comments on collaboration:

“You need to be a good communicator, demonstrate empathy and understanding, whilst balancing these attributes with the confidence and assertiveness to ensure performance and quality attributes are maintained.”

Property and Facilities Manager at Pulteney Grammar School, Andrew Shaw, describes how critical communication skills are to leadership:

“Throughout my leadership journey, being able to work with people is definitely the most important, transferrable skill I’ve developed. You need to have really good people skills to be in any sort of leadership position.

I’m very big on collaboration and bringing people along for the journey, when you get people involved, people will embrace what they can do. Always look after your people first, and the job will take care of itself.”

Prioritisation skills

Facilities managers have to juggle a lot of different tasks and projects at any point in time. Good time management and an ability to effectively prioritise between competing projects is key to success in FM.

Facilities Manager for Mercy Hospital, Robert Larsen, stated:

“Time management and prioritisation are absolutely key in my opinion. You need to know that you’re dealing with the right things at the right time, and not burning time on something less important.”

Nadia Zeini, Facilities Manager at Hobart City Mission says similarly:

“You need to be really organised and be able to manage a heavy workload. Often, I’m juggling multiple projects at any point in time, having to switch between them simultaneously whilst giving them all the appropriate attention they need. Being able to prioritise work is really key.”

Administrative skills

As with most industries, advances in technology have changed the way facilities teams work. Good data management and keen administrative skills are critical for teams to maintain compliance and manage expenditure.

Beaufort and Skipton Support Services Manager Kel Oswin explains:

“While once the job was all about being able to repair things, now we have a lot more administrative work around when we are going to fix something. It might frustrate some, but I see this as being something really empowering, and great for understanding the business.”  

He continues:

“It’s not enough anymore to be seen as the people who just fix things. We can’t just fix something that’s broken and let someone else worry about the admin, it just doesn’t cut it anymore.

The hands that know how to repair things must be the same hands that know how to input data, use the software that supports it, and then run the reports.”

This is a sentiment echoed by Hobart City Mission Facilities Manager Nadia Zeini, who says:

“A lot of the role is administrative, there’s a lot of putting together scopes of work, contracts, service agreements, performance reviews, and other more back-end business skills.”

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