It’s not easy being the boss. In management, you help employees advance their careers, improve the business’s bottom line, and juggle priorities without dropping the ball.
While it’s not a walk in the park, you’ve learned to handle whatever corporate life throws at you. Yet, demonstrating your abilities on a manager resume is challenging. How do you showcase experience and knowledge on one page?
We have the top resume tips to help you make a resume you’ll be proud to submit, and we’ll also walk through the manager resume writing process.
These five manager resume samples are helping managers land their next role in 2023, and they can help you write a resume that will catch any hiring manager’s attention.
Why this resume works
- Focusing your manager resume on projects you’ve led is one of the best ways to demonstrate your leadership abilities.
- Start your work experience bullet points with action verbs like “led,” “founded,” “directed,” “oversaw,” and “managed” to immediately convey your role.
- Starting your resume from a blank page can feel overwhelming, so try a resume outline to organize your thoughts.
- If you’re a senior manager, tailor your work experience only to include the most relevant positions and technical skills, but if you’re newer to the field, consider adding a resume objective to convey your passion and abilities further.
Why this resume works
- If you’ve been a project manager for over 10 years, consider adding a resume summary.
- While it’s not much different than an objective, this lets employers know your qualifications and your abilities before they even look at your work experience.
- Including an optional certifications section on your project manager resume is one way to get your foot in the door.
- Even if you have one certification, it’s worth including it in its own area, so it’s easier to pinpoint.
- Don’t have any certifications? Research certifications available for project managers and start learning. Whether it takes you a lot of time or a little, know that you’re taking a big step toward forward movement!
Why this resume works
- Whenever possible, state your impact using quantifiable metrics. Even if they’re rough estimates, numbers are the best way to demonstrate your management abilities.
- Want to know the best way to make your resume stand out? Tailor your work experience and skills to the product manager job description by using specific responsibilities and keywords.
- Your product manager resume should explicitly state your role, project goals, and impact for each position listed in your work experience.
Why this resume works
- A successful account manager increases sales, so your resume should discuss improving sales in your past experience.
- You can also focus on other important metrics like the number of accounts you opened, the success of your upsells, and how you improved customer retention.
- Writing an account manager resume from scratch can be overwhelming; consider using a resume template to help you decide what to include and how to format your resume.
- When choosing a template, make sure you choose one that allows plenty of room for work experience, skills, and contact information.
- Using a template doesn’t mean you can’t get creative; feel free to make it your own with color and different fonts to help it look more like you.
Why this resume works
- As you gain more operations management experience, limit the number of skills in your “skills” section to make your past experience the focus of your resume.
- Ideally, you should limit this list to five to seven technical skills.
- Instead of stating your management experience in isolation, focus your operations manager resume on your successes in managing teams to achieve a specific outcome.
- For example, did you collaborate with partners to target a specific goal? Did you launch a new rotation system that improved efficiency?
- Consider your responsibilities and how you went above and beyond to meet your goals and help others.
Related resume guides
Manager Resume FAQs
It may feel like a struggle right now, but we highly recommend you keep your manager resume at one page.
You may have lots of valuable experience in more senior positions, and it’s hard to figure out what to cut. It’s more than okay to exclude the job you held in college, and it’s okay to exclude entry-level roles and possibly mid-level roles, depending on how much experience you have.
A good rule of thumb is to include three jobs in your resume, beginning with your most recent position. If you include four to six bullet points for each role, you’ll find it’s a breeze to keep your management resume to a page.
At a glance, recruiters and employers want to see your management skills and abilities in action. There are so many types of managers, such as project managers, operations managers, account managers—the list goes on.
No matter the company or the profession, your resume job description bullet points should be chock-full of examples of where you led projects and teams successfully. You’ll have a winning resume when you back up your claims with numbers by writing descriptive points like Led and coordinated a project with HR to re-design new-hire training, which reduced average onboarding time by 18%.
If you’re looking to move up the ladder rungs, the best thing you can do in your manager resume is to show how you’ve exercised ownership and autonomy in your experience.
In your work history section on your resume, write about experiences where you headed up your own projects from start to finish, volunteered mentorship or suggestions that left a positive impact, and demonstrated a high aptitude for time management, organization, and problem-solving.
