You handle a lot! You address short- and long-term organizational operation goals, managing policies, procedures, and strategic plans. Your senior level of experience also equips you to take on a leadership role and mentor other operations managers, guiding them toward peak efficiency.
But you might still have a few questions about writing a great cover letter and resume, such as how it should look and what you should include.
You’re in the right place! We’ve put together these three templates along with our resume examples for you to take a look at, plus some handy tips.
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Professional Experience
Your skills lay the framework for the experiences that will show recruiters why you’re the ideal hire. No recruiter has much time to spend on the next resume in their pile, so you’ll need to cut right to the chase with a punchy, effective skills section.
Keep each skill nice and close to your profession so that nothing you list sounds interchangeable or generic. You want to stand out as unique and impossible to pass up! Go for stuff like “employee onboarding” and “Salesforce” instead of anything generic like CRM.
Make sure all your skills are specific to show you have depth of knowledge. The more particular you get about naming programs and presenting your interpersonal skills from a technical angle, the better.
Here’s what we mean:
9 most popular Senior Operations Manager skills
- Salesforce
- MS Excel/Word
- Tableau
- Google Analytics
- Employee Onboarding
- Data Presentation
- Leadership
- Prioritization
- Data Reporting
Sample senior operations manager work experience bullet points
Now that you’ve laid out your skills, it’s time to let recruiters know what you can accomplish with them: They want to know what you’ve already done so that they have an idea of what you’d be like at your next job!
Be as strategic about your experience bullet points as you are about your operations planning at work: Showcase a series of accomplishments that grows in complexity throughout your work history. Whether taking ownership during a disruption in the supply chain or successfully managing multiple business sites, ensure each bullet point is closely related to the job at hand.
And always back up your achievements with quantifiable data! Use clear metrics to gauge your success so that each point looks more credible.
Here are some examples:
- Initiated customer service training specifically for delivery drivers, reducing instances of miscommunication with customers by 35%
- Coordinated delivery schedules and staff schedules to reduce product delivery delays by 18%
- Negotiated with long-term vendors to secure 14% or more in discounts while forming relationships with new vendors
- Listened to staff’s needs and restructured personnel shifts and assignments, resulting in an increased retention rate of 29%
Top 5 Tips for Your Senior Operations Manager Resume
- Show depth of knowledge
- Think “quality over quantity!” Instead of providing a bunch of experience examples that are little more than regurgitated job duties, maintain variety and interest that still centers around the skills a company is specifically seeking, such as budgeting or scheduling strategies.
- Leave out the objective/summary
- Most of the time, you don’t need one, and this is especially true for a senior operations manager. Let your experience speak for itself: What makes you great at operations management? Where have you seen the most success? Whether building powerful collaborations or getting a business into compliance, let your success tell your story in your work experience.
- Don’t get too zany
- A little personality goes a long way, but in a senior role, a professional resume template will turn recruiters’ heads whereas a template that’s overly bold with wild colors may be a death sentence to you getting the job.
- Demonstrate versatility
- There’s so much to say about your professional history! So don’t undersell yourself by falling back on the same examples or metrics every time: Switch things up and add details like whether you used AWS or Azure during your project, and be sure what you add aligns with the job description.
- Add context
- Share what made each experience unique. Context can provide a clearer lens for recruiters to view your resume.
- For example, the training you implemented was specifically for delivery drivers or you restructured shifts and assignments because you listened to your staff.
Yep! But it isn’t as time-consuming as it may seem. Just revisit the operations manager job ad, and look for key programs, qualities, or skills (think “Salesforce” or “negotiation”) that you can reflect in your resume. Switch these up each time!
It’s all about how you frame your experience section! Let your most advanced and complex milestones appear most recently in your work history to show you’ve grown with every role. This kind of resume format means you’ll place older job experience—like when you were an entry-level operations manager or business analyst—at the bottom.
If you’re interested in making a true, lasting impression, then make sure you gather other components for a great application package: A cover letter and a letter or two of professional recommendation that speaks to your expertise in compliance, success in crisis management, and strategy behind finances and KPIs.
