ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR DATA-DRIVEN PROJECT MANAGEMENT: A CLASSROOM TEACHING EXPERIMENT.We investigate the performance of students in a Datadriven Project Management course module that consists of several realistic case studies derived from the book "The datadriven project manager: A statistical battle against project obstacles" (Vanhoucke 2018). Based on case study evaluations, we monitor the students' level for various technical and nontechnical skills. We identify and classify seven project management skills in management literature and, subsequently, we statistically investigate the link between these skills and the student performance during the course module. Also, a model to incorporate these skills in the Dynamic Scheduling framework is proposed and validated using Structural Equation Modeling.