You keep the show moving. From initiation all the way through to closing, you know how to deliver a project on time and on budget.
How can you showcase these end-to-end skills on your senior project manager resume? That’s where we can help.
Since we’ve started BeamJobs, we’ve helped thousands of project managers land their next job. Our three senior project manager examples and guide are designed as your jumping off point to land yours. Also check out our free resume builder and AI cover letter generator.
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Work Experience
On your senior project manager resume, your skills are the prerequisite for even getting to take the final exam. If you don’t have the right skills, a recruiter is much less likely to grant you an interview.
What are the “right” skills? Luckily you’re not flying blind here. You even have a cheat sheet. I’m talking about the job description, of course.
Look over the job description and note any technical skills mentioned. Do you have any of these skills?
If so, they better be on your resume! Those are the first things the recruiter will look for.
9 Biggest Senior Project Manager Skills
- Jira
- Trello
- Tableau
- SDLC
- Agile/ Scrum
- Budgeting
- Excel/ Google Sheets
- SQL
- Python
Example Senior Project Manager Work Experience Bullet Points
The main show. The big lights. The whole enchilada.
Your work experience will be the single biggest factor in determining whether you get that glorious “Can we interview you?” email.
To cut to the chase, your work experience number bullet points need to focus on your impact.
The formula is simple: Talk about the project at a high level. What action you took within/ for that project. Then a measurable outcome of the project.
Did it improve revenue? Did you come in under budget? Ahead of schedule? Anything to quantify the impact.
Here are a few ideas from our best resume samples:
- Delivered a novel, innovative B2B data extension of the primary product all the way from initiation through closing generating $3M in annual revenue
- Managed a team of 6 software developers and 2 product managers to enable the product internationally and executed this project under budget by $400,000
- Worked closely with security engineers to assess scope and priority of project milestones to reduce exposure of user data through reduction in network calls by over 7%
- Created robust system to identify most intensive resources on site load and proactively worked with developers to tackle those issues resulting in a page speed increase of 63%
Top 5 Tips for Your Senior Project Manager Resume
- Showcase your ownership
- Executives and company leadership turn to senior project managers to help them lighten their workload. Make it glaringly obvious you’ve done this in your past roles. Use active verbs like “created,” “built,” and “owned” to start off your work experience bullet points.
- Talk about hiring experience
- As a project manager, you work with a lot of different teammates. A lot of companies turn to project managers as part of the hiring process for this very reason. If you have experience with hiring in any capacity, this can be the difference maker in getting an interview.
- What impact did you have?
- We sound like a broken record at this point, but it’s true: measure your impact. These metrics can be very rough estimates. Project managers are responsible for improving business KPIs so showing you’ve done that in the past is the whole ballgame.
- Presentation of results
- The more senior you get in your PM career, the more you will likely have to present to company leadership. Having this experience, especially when applying for roles at larger companies, gives the recruiter confidence you know how to articulate and present your work.
- Data is key
- Since metrics and presentation are such important aspects of the work of a project manager, it’s only right you focus on your data visualization and analysis skills. How do you know a project is worth doing? How do you know it’s working? These are great questions to ask when thinking about your experience working with data.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Do project management certifications matter?
- They matter less and less the more experienced you are in your career. As a senior project manager, they don’t matter a ton. However, they are still worth including especially if they are mentioned in the job description.
- How do I customize my senior project manager resume for each job?
- Step 1, read the job description. Step 2, add any technical skills (that you have) mentioned in the job description to your resume. Step 3, add any projects that come to mind while doing Step 1 to your resume.
- What goes in my career summary?
- If you decide to include a summary of your career, it should focus on your career impact. For example, how much revenue have your projects generated in total? How many users have they reached? Any metric you can aggregate.
