Project Manager Cv Example

In this post,you will get an inside view of what hiring managers look for when they look at project manager resumes.
Resume is a meaty topic but first we're going to do a bit of a perspective exercise.I'm going to tell you about the number one thing that most people get wrong about resumes and it's the primary reason your resume is not getting read then I'm going to follow it up with eight tips just general tips on how to make your resumes a thousand percent better and then I'm going to get into eight steps that you can follow to prepare a resume that will get you the interview.

Let's talk about that number one mistake that people make with their resumes and here it is the number one mistake that people make is that they fail to recognize that the resume is a piece of marketing material. It is not simply a place for you to record all of your employment history.A lot of  people would say that sounds a little bit crazy,that's that's what I believe. The resume is  to put all of my experience so that people know whether or not I'm the right person for the job and what they end up doing is they end up listing where they worked,their title and their responsibilities and I have to say as as a portfolio lead or someone who would hire project managers within a PMO that's really not that useful for me I know what a project manager does and great that the job description that you put there matches the role but it tells me nothing at all about why you're the right person for the project management role that I have available right now.

What I need to know as the hiring manager is what makes you different from the next person. What I need to know is what experiences have you had and what have you learned from those experiences that will be beneficial to the projects that I would put you on if I were to hire you as my next project manager. In order to be successful at putting out resumes and getting a response you first have to put yourself in the shoes of the hiring manager. Let's do that for just a second because I think it's really going to help you draft a much better resume so let's take a moment to understand the world of the hiring manager what's going on in their life right now because I firmly believe that if you understood this you would be able to write a resume that gets their attention if you're applying to a job in a larger organization that has a PMO chances are the hiring manager is going to be a portfolio manager,that is, a project someone who who manages multiple project managers to deliver on a portfolio of projects for an organization. That portfolio manager might may have a portfolio of a hundred million dollars worth of project investments that's a lot to oversee.

They may have many different project managers working for them to deliver on this portfolio. This manager's day is probably filled from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m,completely full of meeting. So they're in a meeting after meeting and every night. They probably go home and think to themselves at some point I need to actually get some work done not sure how I'm going to do that because I'm in back-to-back meetings all day but at some point I'm going to need to get some work done and their anxiety levels are high because their work,their to-do list just keeps getting bigger and bigger and it's not actually that they're  able to make any progress against  it. You don't have to be a portfolio manager to have a day in life that looks just like that but understand that your hiring manager probably has this going on in their life right now to make matters worse,there's one thing I know for sure about this person and that is that this person is short-staffed that's the whole reason why they've got a a job posting out there that you are now replying to. They have  more projects in their portfolio than they have project managers to to handle. What that means is  that this portfolio manager is probably in more meetings to keep things moving on.

Those projects that he or she does not have for managers for so it further compounds the issue that they're being pulled in a hundred different directions so they put out a job posting and what ends up happening is is they're going to get I guarantee you anywhere between 100 and 600 resume responses from that posting. Given the situation that they're in their deepest hope, their deepest desire is that they will be able to very quickly skim through the resumes,pick out about three to five of them that they think might be good candidates,have three to five interviews again. These three to five one-hour interviews have to be fitted to this already packed meeting schedule and they better do well at the end of those three to five interviews, with the time invested have a really great candidate that will help them alleviate some of the pressure.

So when you're out there submitting your resume and you're lamenting the fact that if they only just took the time to get to know me if they could have at least just called and interviewed me then they would have understood. What you have to understand is that hiring managers don't have time to interview hundreds of people in order to figure out whether or not those people might work out really,their only choice as hiring managers is to bring a stack of resumes  and to do their best to go through as quickly as possible in one evening and pull the three to five resumes out that they think might be promising.

But it's a hard thing to do because almost every resume in the pile is going to list where they worked the job,that they did title for the job and the actual responsibilities which again we know. It's very hard to know whether or not a person is going to be the right person for the job just based on the resume so you have to understand that and so I'll go back to my earlier comment your resume is actually a piece of marketing material.

Now what is marketing? Marketing is all about standing out in in and out of a bunch of noise and getting a person's attention so that you can deliver a message,that is all marketing is and there is a lot of noise out there in this particular process because you are one of a stack of hundreds of resumes. A lot of hiring managers will leverage their HR departments to help them weed out some candidates and they will have some pretty ruthless criteria that they ask the HR folks to follow. Keep in mind the HR folks probably don't know a lot about project management so they're literally just looking for specific keywords and if those keywords don't exist in the resume,then they are taking the resumes out and then making this stack this stack so that the hiring manager at least has a chance of getting through all of them.

To further illustrate my point just a little bit more and then we'll move on to the the eight tips that I have for you I'm going to give you an example of two different advertisements and tell you what's in each ad and then I want you to tell me which one is more appealing which one catches your eye just a little bit more or your ear so just because I know I'm going to sort of tell you about two different ads okay so you tell me which one you think is more appealing so let's pretend there's a computer company and computer company a puts out an ad and it says

'we're a computer company we do research and development,we source parts from suppliers we put all of those parts together and make computers we established a distribution network by our computers' ,that's  advertisement number one. Here's advertisement number two
 'as a computer company were focused mainly on students and schools we found ways to keep things affordable because we understand the financial pressures that students face,we found a way to stay relevant through the economic downturn of 2008 and we've discovered creative ways to provide high-touch service in a market where margins are getting pretty thin,we're passionate about students and education and we've dedicated ourselves to providing the right tools at the right price for education please buy our computers'.

So what do you think about the difference between those two ads now if you're being honest and I hope you I hope you are,the second advertisement is definitely more appealing if you happen to be a student or perhaps someone associated with education. Ad number one is very similar to what we see in a lot of our resumes basically.A list of all the things that we do. Ad number two it talks about what they do but it talks about the challenges you might even be able to infer some of what they've learned right in order for a computer company to have high-touch service in today's world they they probably had to think outside of the box like it gives you a lot more to think about and it gives you a sense that they're passionate about what they do.

This is how we want our resumes to feel and sound and so we'll talk a bit about how to make your resume stand out in that way so that a person who reads it would say 'yeah you know  what that's for me I think that is a good candidate for the position'.

Now lets proceed to the eight tips that I have for you.

Tip number one is the one that drives me crazy the most is please do not carpet-bomb your resume out to hundreds of different job ads it's obvious to those people who read the resume that you have just blasted it out to as many people as possible and the reason for that is is because I don't see anything in the resume that's specific to the job that I'm offering and sometimes I will even see people with progressive experience that doesn't actually make any sense for the job that I'm offering so I know those people are out there just to open job postings.  What that means in essence if you're carpet bombing the the world with your resume is that  you've adopted the wrong tactic and you're probably one of those people that say  'I've sent my resume to a hundred people nobody has responded'.  That's because they know that you're spamming the entire world with your resume,because it doesn't say anything specific that would appeal to that particular manager who has that particular role open.

So that leads to my next tip which is if you're not going to carpet-bomb what are you going to do?  You're going to actually be very specific and you're going to be be laser-like focused on specific jobs that are in line with where you are in your career right now and will help support you in your journey to advance in your career. You will get far better results if you spend the majority of your time searching for the just the right opportunity and applying to those few opportunities and I'm talking to a handful,five maybe ten but the perfect opportunities and then crafting our resume that markets you as the perfect person for that perfect opportunity. That's what job hunting should be about not just spamming the world with your resume and hoping for the best that never works out and and I'm telling you on the other side of it like it is completely obvious that's what you're doing and it's a complete turnoff so be laser-like focused and then you tailor your resume to the specific job opening.

The third tip that I have for you is yes a cover letter is important it is not dead I know in this day and age where you know we're used to communicating with far less words than we used to use letters are kind of a thing of the past. But when it comes to job searching a letter that summarizes why you should be considered with it goes a long a long way for a hiring manager now I've met some hiring managers say they don't read those things but the majority of the hiring managers  can tell you that they read those cover letters. It should only be a paragraph or two long. Treat the hiring manager like you would any executive out there,they don't have a lot of time but one or two paragraphs should truly summarize exactly why you're right for the role and why the role is right for you and it pulls the reader in to the resume because once they've read a compelling cover letter they say well I want to learn more so let's dig into that resume and see if we agree with you that you're the perfect person for the job. So cover letters are important.

Number four,listing your education is important and you should do it but dates on that education are not required I'm going to say that although it isn't fair I know from personal experience that age factor is still very much alive out there. If you have your degrees and your education and it shows that you got those degrees and education 40 years ago if it's a more junior role that you're applying for it's going to be a turn-off for a lot of people. It really shouldn't be a factor but I'm telling you based on experience that age factor happens and so  to avoid any of that my recommendation to you is you don't need to put any dates on your resume.  It's not relevant,the only thing people need to know is what did you study and what you learnt.

Tip number five,along the same vein is tip number four. One of the things I recommend that people do is they only put the last five to ten years of relevant experience on their resume if you have 20 or 30 or 40 years of relevant experience I would suggest that you leave it off because ten years of relevant experience should be more than enough for any job that you might be applying for. So to eliminate any chance whatsoever of age factor getting in the way of you getting that interview and getting that opportunity to sit in front of somebody and showcase what you have to offer I say list just five to ten years it should be more than enough for you to get the interview that you're after.
Tip number six, your personal interests and what you do after work are not needed on the resume.I know a lot of people have said in the past that maybe it makes you more personable or perhaps you'd maybe the hiring manager might have a similar interest to you and therefore they might hire you and maybe there might be a hiring manager out there that this would work for but I can tell you that for hiring managers who are living the nightmare of getting work done, it's not something that's going to get you the job and it's kind of a waste of space on the resume so you don't need to put your personal interests on the resume as far as I am concerned.

Tip number seven,I see a lot of people listing references directly on the resume this is absolutely not required I would only need to see references if I've decided that I wanted to move forward with you I'm certainly not going to if I don't have time to read every single resume and if I don't have time to interview every single person that applies.I certainly will not have time to call all of the references when the time comes. It's when you are considered a good fit for the role,that's when you'll be requested to present your references but you do not need to put those on the resume.
The eighth and final tip that I have for you is about resume length now a lot of us have had conflicting information about how long a resume should be, I can tell you that the resume should be as long as it needs to be you've got a certain message that you need to deliver. So don't stress about the size of the resume or the length of the resume,the resume is as long as it needs to be and that's the rule.

Now it's time to take you through the eight steps that you need to go through in order to create a resume and cover letter that gets noticed and gets you the callback for the interview. Step number one,if we're not carpet bombing the world with our resume,then what we're doing is, we're finding those specific jobs that are right for us and we're applying to those so step number one's quite simply go find those jobs. There are different ways for you if you're just getting started out in your career,to get started,find a small company and grow within that company and become well-rounded  or go to a large company and start from the bottom and work your way up the benefits. There you've got lots of experienced people around you that you can learn from so just make your choice what kind of organization you want to work for and then go and find those organizations. Go to the job pages for those companies see if they're offering any jobs for project managers.

Going directly to each company's job board or Help page on their website yields the best results one tool that you can use when it come as a job board is indeed.com. It's simply a sites' aggregator and what it does is,it looks for job descriptions and employers' sites and scrape that information and then they put it in their search engine so that you can find them. I would recommend that you find maybe between five and ten jobs and it could take you a several days  to pull all of that together but once you do and you've got five or ten job descriptions in your hands and you want to apply to them the next thing you'll want to do is to read those descriptions a couple of times and what you're looking for is what kinds of challenges might that employer be experiencing right now that they need your help with now this could be very difficult and this exercise sometimes yields results,sometimes it doesn't. What I typically do is  I grab my highlighter and I start highlighting things that that might reveal what some of their challenges are,maybe their challenge is that's a larger project or program than they within their organization are used to handling that might come through in the text maybe the issue is there's an external vendor they've never dealt with before or maybe they have an issue because they're trying to implement technology that they don't have a lot of familiarity with or perhaps they have an issue with difficult stakeholders sometimes that information can be implied or inferred in the job description grab your trusty highlighter try to read between the lines a little bit and then make notes and highlight wherever you think there might be an indication that there's a special need and if there are any then you're in luck it's done so always a case a lot of these job descriptions are cut and pasted cookie cutter and they don't tell you a whole lot which is part of the problem but if you do happen to find some of those statements in there that are unusual then highlight them and you're going to use them in subsequent steps to tailor your resume.

Some other ideas on what you might potentially look for are any mentions of sizes of projects, mentions of project type and environment type like they might be very specific about having a person who has worked in a particular kind of environment, highlight all of those statements. Another thing you might be able to do get a little background on on what some of the company's current challenges are is to a bit of reconnaissance on LinkedIn. Remember we've only picked 5 to 10 opportunities here that we're interested in so we can we know have the time to do a bit of reconnaissance we can figure out who works within that department via LinkedIn they may list what some of their colleagues are you might be able to get an idea as to some of the structure,you might even happen to know someone who works at that company and LinkedIn will tell you if you're connected to one of those people and you can even get an introduction and have coffee with someone again this is the beauty of narrowing your selection of which opportunities you want to go for it down to you know five to ten now you don't have forever to do this research but it's very important that you at least try.

Another thing you could do is you can go directly to the company's about us web page. They might have their company history,they might have press releases,they might have if they're a public company you know various and you will reports and other things that you can read to give you a little insight as to how this company intends to differentiate itself. Is it branching off into new areas like the finance industry?So reading press releases and other things will help you understand that if nothing else it might give you a little something to talk about when you get in for the interview and it is very impressive and tells them that person is interested enough in the company that they've taken the time to learn a little about what that company is doing. All of these things could be very useful to you as you tailor your cover letter and your resume and respond to those particular job openings
Step number three is to prepare your resume to get through the HR's filters. What I recommend you to do on any of the job descriptions or the help-wanted ads that you have I want you to scroll right down to the skills section the skills and requirements section and see what's listed there if they are requiring a four-year degree or if they are requiring a specific kind certification or a requiring previous experience with a specific type of technology mark those things down I'm assuming because you've selected this job opportunity that you meet those criteria but what you have to remember to do is to make sure that for the inexperienced HR person you need to have those things those keywords showing up very prominently in your resume.

Step four is where it all comes together. So you've done your research on the company you've gone through the job opening in great detail several times to figure out if there's any particular thing that they're struggling with you've looked at their skills section you know that you can help them that your experience actually will go a long way towards helping them deliver on whatever projects they have,now is the time to go through your job experience section by section job or employer by employer and make sure that you're highlighting the skills that would be very useful for that particular job when you look at the bullet points that you have in those sections where you described you know the job itself here are some questions you can use to help you re-evaluate what you've got there some of the things that that we look for when we're looking for project managers as information on the size and scope and environment that you were working in so if you are working in a company of 8,000 people then you may want to mention something about the size right of the stakeholder groups and some of the projects that you were in. You may want to mention environments like if it was a Microsoft shop versus something else,you may want to mention some of those things so that the person reading the resume can get a sense as to okay yeah they have worked in an environment that's similar to mine they may not necessarily always know based on the employers name what goes on at that employer what that employer is all about so this is especially true if you're not working if your previous experience isn't from like some a well-known company like IBM or  Bank of America or something like that,so put some things in there that describe the projects and the environments that you're familiar with other things that we want to know about are you know the size and complexity of the projects that you've managed so mentioning numbers like projects with a total project investment up to 20 million,40 million or 250 thousand.

Whatever it is mention the size of the project,it's very important. Again for the project ,make the hiring manager to know the size of those projects I know that cost isn't always a great indicator of complexity but it certainly is the most accepted way of doing it quickly so we want to know relative size if there's any other information that that lends itself to helping us understand the complexity,that kind of information is very useful as well make sure also that your bullets talk a little bit about what you have learned what challenges you've faced . Now this can get a little bit tricky and it takes a little bit of copy writing acumen to get to get this right.  We can't be seen as sharing all of our previous employers dirty laundry so instead of saying something like it will learned how to deal with difficult stakeholders thereby calling out people at your previous employment a bad employer were difficult you could say something to the effect of expanded stakeholder management skills to address the specific needs of the project that's more than enough to get it to pique the interest of an experienced hiring manager.

The fact that you needed to expand your skills to ensure the success of the project means there's something that you might be able to talk about in the interview and it'll help the hiring manager to know the kind of expansion you're talking about because he or she would like to know what you learnt in that situation so being able to articulate what you learned and the challenges that you faced are some of the most important information you can include on a resume .

Finally for each section where you highlight your experiences,hiring managers want you to put down any evidence that you have that your efforts were appreciated so if you won some sort of an award like a quarterly or annual award for your performance putting that there also is very helpful because again that's the kind of thing we would talk about in the interview to know why you won that award ,what did you do that warranted that kind of recognition. This is the kind of thing hiring managers want to see,that your previous efforts were appreciated might be a bit difficult if one of the reasons why you're looking is that your previous efforts are not being appreciated but if you happen to have evidence that it was putting you in the resume is a really great idea don't forget to do that.

Next step number five,after you've gone through section by section and you've highlighted the things that you've learned and the challenges and all the environmental type of information,you are now ready to write a summary you will put it a top of the resume and that summary will list the things that makes you the best candidate for that role. I've seen some people use an objective statement and those objective statements can work providing that your objective isn't generic like I want to leverage my unique set of skills to make a big difference for company XYZ which I see that all the time.  If the objective is actually really quite crisp,which is looking to to work for an organization where I can be with other more experienced team and build a career such that I can become more experienced in a year or two,that sounds pretty good it tells me that you'd be motivated in the role that I have available that kind of thing as an objective would work but I much prefer the summary.

The summary is all the reasons why you are an excellent candidate for the role. Go back through your job history and highlight the points that you think are the most important,would be the most impactful for this employer to see and bring those together and summarize them such that all of those salient points are right at the top of the resume. Like I said a resume,is a piece of marketing material and as with all marketing you have just a few moments to catch a person's interest.

Those first few points will either draw the hiring manager in and get them to invest more time and looking at those other bullets that you just worked so hard on or it will turn them off and and then you've missed your opportunity. So summary is very important,it's what actually gets them to read the rest of the resume,spend some time on it.

The next step after you've written the summary is to write the cover letter. The cover letter in the summary are going to be very similar to one another. It's the same kind of information only that the summary is kind of written in third person,about you and candidate with this much experience etc. The cover letter is more first person. In the cover letter you're going to say things like where you saw the the job posting, why you're interested in the job posting and the company. If you were referred you'll want to mention the name of the person that referred you and then you'll go on to talk about a lot of the points,the same points that you talked about in the summary but re-wording it a little bit to be more in the language that you would normally see in a letter.

Again your cover letter should only be a couple of paragraphs at most not too many because you don't want them to lose interest if it's way too long. Make it short make,punchy because you want to be taken seriously by a lot of hiring managers.  Then there's the final step and it's one that most people forget to do even I forget to do it from time to time and that is,after you've gone through and you've overhauled your resume and tailored it to the position, you've done your summary and you've done your cover letter the next step is to walk away from it all for 24 hours and then come back to it and then go through and read it again.

What you'll find is a whole bunch of mistakes that were not visible to you the day before and do a final set of edits after that you're ready to apply. Depending on the company that you're applying to,you may have to convert all of this to text and upload it into a system or upload a PDF or what have you or even email in some cases people are still accepting email.

If you have the right perspective and you understand that the resume is for marketing not just listing your job your job duties over the last X number of years and you don't carpet-bomb but you get very specific and targeted on the jobs that you want to apply for,if you put in the effort and the time I guarantee you you're going to get interviews. I guarantee it because no one else is taking the time to put together the right message so that they can get noticed everyone else is just doing that carpet bombing and hoping for the best don't be that person be the person who was very intentional with their marketing message that they wanted to put in front of a very specific person do that and you will get an opportunity to sell yourself in person.

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