Although much literature exists on desired qualities of team leaders of IT projects and even desired components of the team, there is a paucity of literature on the desired personal qualities of individuals working within team settings. This research set out to empirically investigate the personal qualities which students believe would be desirable in IT project team members. An initial attempt to create a taxonomy of desired personal qualities was made using feedback from two groups of students; undergraduate and graduate students who had completed an IT project management (ITPM) course. The students were asked, as part of a major group assignment, to give the personal qualities that they would want in project team members if they were a project manager. This topic had not been explicitly covered in their course, though there had been an underlying emphasis on the importance of "soft skills". From reading the students' responses, a taxonomy that varied along two main dimensions was developed; first, whether the named quality related specifically to the work environment or whether the quality was one that would be relevant to many aspects of life, and second, whether or not the quality relied on interaction with others and thus whether it was better described as personal or interpersonal. Further, a division was made concerning whether the quality was more a characteristic of a person, called a trait here, or a skill. After the initial taxonomy was developed, it was applied to a different set of students. This new group of students had recently completed a third level, year long, group IT project for external clients. These students, who were from a different university from the first two groups of students, were asked, via email, to give the personal qualities they would want in project team members. From reading the responses, it was apparent that the taxonomy needed to be extended by adding a new dimension, "values", which would include qualities like "honest" and "hard-working". This new dimension thus allowed a distinction to be made between qualities that reflected a person's values and those that did not, like being "co- operative" or "fun-loving". While a simple reading of the responses had led to a taxonomy and while it was apparent that the third group had responded somewhat differently from the first two groups, it was not clear if the third group differed significantly from the first two groups or, in fact, whether the first two groups differed from each other. The resulting extended taxonomy was thus applied to a comparison of three groups of students to see if response patterns differed significantly. To test for differences between the groups, an analysis of the quality first mentioned by each student was performed. The first quality mentioned by each student was recorded and classified according to the taxonomy. The first quality mentioned was used as it would not be possible to include every quality mentioned by every student and first mentioned qualities seemed better to use than a random quality because the placement of the quality was thus kept constant and, being first, was possibly the most important for the student. A log-linear analysis was performed on the frequency data for the three groups. The results showed that there was a highly significant interaction between the student groups and the dimensions on the taxonomy. That is, each of the three groups showed a different pattern of responding. For the group project students, just over half of the first mentioned qualities fell into the "Environment Specific-Values" cell. This was in great contrast to the other two groups of students, both of whom gave few responses that belonged in this cell. The graduate ITPM students were less concerned with "Personal-Ubiquitous" skills and traits than undergraduate ITPM students. On the other hand, the undergraduate ITPM students were less concerned than the graduate students with "Interpersonal-Environment Specific" skills or "Interpersonal-Ubiquitous" traits. Both the graduate and undergraduate ITPM students were more concerned with "Environment Specific-Personal skills" (where "hard skills" like "programming" and "documentation skills" would belong) than were the group project students. Although the initial aim of this study was to develop a taxonomy of desired personal qualities for IT project team members, the study led to a realisation that the personal qualities listed by students are a window to understanding the differing circumstances of the respondents. Students who have had the experience of working with other students in a year long group project for external clients come to put great emphasis of the "work values" of team members. In contrast, the other student groups were more concerned with "work related personal "hard" skills". The group project students may be reacting to an environment in which some of their fellow students did not do a reasonable share of work on the project. It may be that while universities attempt to provide "real world" experiences of team work, students may be confronted to an unrealistic degree with poor work ethics of fellow team members, thus leading to a perspective where work values are paramount. Interestingly, while the ITPM course had placed an emphasis on "soft skills", the undergraduate ITPM students gave less emphasis to interpersonal qualities than graduate students. It may be that the work experience of graduate students has allowed them to see the importance of interpersonal skills. Though initially not concerned with the effects of different methods of educating future IT Project members, findings give some insight into such educational issues. (Contains 6 tables and 1 figure.)