A surgical resident stands in a fully equipped operating room, gowned and credentialed, while the attending surgeon runs a robotic prostatectomy from a console four feet away. The trainee has a second console. They touch nothing. For two years across five hospital sites, researcher Matt Beane watched this happen repeatedly. His conclusion, published in Administrative Science Quarterly and later expanded in The Skill Code, was blunt: the resident had become completely optional.
Now picture your junior PM. They're in the stakeholder call. They have access to the project management platform. They watch you run the risk workshop, see the AI tool draft the communications plan, observe the escalation get resolved. They are present, engaged, and absorbing almost nothing that will make them capable of doing it alone next year.
That's the problem this article is about.
Project management has always had a apprenticeship problem lurking underneath its certification culture. We hand juniors a PMBOK, run them through a PMI exam, and then seat them next to experienced PMs on complex programs — confident that proximity equals development. It doesn't.
Skill in complex knowledge work is built through what researchers call deliberate reps: repeated attempts at a task, with immediate feedback, at the edge of your current capability. A junior PM who watches you negotiate a scope change absorbs a narrative. One who negotiates a scope change themselves — even a small one, even awkwardly — builds a schema they can retrieve and adapt under pressure.
The problem is that modern project environments are optimized for delivery, not development. AI tools generate first-draft risk registers in seconds. Senior PMs, rightly, take the lead on anything that touches executive stakeholders. Processes are streamlined precisely so that fewer decisions require human judgment. Every one of those optimizations makes good business sense in isolation. Together, they hollow out the learning environment for anyone who hasn't already built the underlying competence.
Here is the trade-off nobody talks about in sprint retrospectives: the friction you're eliminating is the curriculum.
When a junior PM struggles to build a resource plan without a template, they learn how resource constraints actually interact with schedule logic. When they produce a stakeholder map that misses three key influencers and you debrief it with them, they build a mental model of organizational dynamics they won't forget. When an AI tool generates that stakeholder map and they review it for accuracy, they learn to evaluate AI output — a useful but narrower skill.
None of this is an argument against AI tools or efficient processes. It's an argument for being deliberate about where you insert productive struggle into a junior's week, because if you don't do it intentionally, efficiency will squeeze it out entirely.
Beane found that the residents who still developed surgical skill under robotic constraints were the ones who bent the rules — who found informal mentors, who negotiated their way into handling instruments during adjacent procedures, who manufactured their own reps outside the optimized workflow. They were the exception. Most residents simply watched.
The parallel in project management is uncomfortable to sit with. Consider how often the following happen on your team:
Each of these is a reasonable decision in context. Collectively, they produce a junior PM who has been on your team for eighteen months and still cannot run a project independently, which you then interpret as a talent problem rather than a design problem.
The fix is not to make juniors do everything unsupported. It's to design explicit rep opportunities into the workflow, the same way a good coach designs drills into practice. Here's what that looks like in practice:
Beane ends his research with a question for organizations: are you using your juniors, or developing them? In most project environments right now, the honest answer is: using them. They handle documentation, update tools, track actions, and free up senior capacity. That's not nothing — operational contribution matters. But it is not a development plan.
The senior PMs and program managers reading this are not villains in this story. They are running under delivery pressure, managing stakeholder expectations, and making rational decisions about who handles what. The problem is systemic, and fixing it requires a deliberate counter-pressure: a decision, made consciously, to accept some short-term efficiency cost in exchange for a team that can actually execute independently in two years.
If your junior PMs cannot run a project alone by the time they've been with you for two years, the question worth asking is not whether they have potential — it's whether you gave them any real reps.
The surgical residents in Beane's study were capable people in a system that made their capability irrelevant to the outcome. The attending surgeon didn't need them to touch anything. The machine made sure of that. Your workflow might be doing exactly the same thing to your team — efficiently, invisibly, and with the best of intentions.
Based on: Your Juniors Are Still Here. The Reps Are Gone.
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