I disagree with this. My company has a non technical employee who has brought in and manages one of our biggest client. Millions of dollars a year. The guy has solid people skills, great management skills, and organizational skills. Provides awesome service to his clients and rallies the engineers to do great work.

It’s harder to get into these roles and to be fair this could depend on project type as well. But you don’t need to have a technical background. This specific employee is running multi discipline projects within our firm. We have our civil, mechanical, electrical, and structural groups all going on his projects. He keeps the projects and money coming in and the engineers keep kicking them out. Everyone is happy.