Whether you are seeking to move from a technical position into a management role or you are an experienced technical project manager, you will need a unique technology management resume that showcases your talents.
Consider the methodologies and tools that you have used to get get results. A hiring manager wants to know not just what you accomplished, but how you got there and what your role was within the team. These might also be keywords that an electronic system will pick up and get you closer to a human recruiter or hiring manager.
Some tips to make your resume stand out when applying for a technical management position.
- Summarize your IT project experience (in a way that an outsider can understand) to highlight your hands-on leadership capabilities.
- Summarize project results, not job function. HR and hiring managers will assess your skill sets more positively when they can visualize the projects and outcomes you’ve worked on before.
- Showcase tools, techniques and methodologies to get results. This means metrics. Did the result save money or productivity. Did it grow revenue or consumer engagement? Provide the metrics for these. Consider PMI methodologies, PMP certifications, as well as key performance indicators (KPIs),and other related tools and methodologies that you might not have thought to include like: Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, rapid applications development (RAD), new product introduction (NPI), Rational Unified Process (RUP), Six Sigma, DMAIC, ITIL, JAD, RAD, SCM, and PMBOK.
- Research the names of the tools, techniques and methodologies that you currently use and be sure they are not unique to your company, and if they are, find their industry specific name. For example use ERP so that you aren’t weeded out based on knowing SAP, when really your skills would be useful with any enterprise resource planning software.
- Showcase project challenges and solutions. This will give a window into your leadership as well problem resolution capabilities. A great thing for a candidate to have when looking for someone to have a ‘big picture’ scope.
- Discuss interactions with stakeholders. Many times in technical leadership positions, people are looking for the softer skills sets as well. Communication across diverse groups, offshore team management, presentations to Boards and stakeholders. It’s all part of the well rounded candidate they need to fill their position.
- Consider a project addendum with each project’s details. Still, it should be concise. A line for the problem (why technology was needed), action (what you put into place/your decision to implement a specific technology and why) and result (the metric–what it did for the company) will suffice.
- Be prepared to change it up for different job apps. People do not read resumes word for word, so make sure to highlight the specific skill sets desired in the first half page. You still have them, you just need to present them differently to capture attention quickly.
- Save space: remove objective and minimize education bullets, unless crucial to the job
If you are overwhelmed with trying to display your tech management talent and unique goal-driven skill set, we are here to help. As Silicon Valley resume writers, we work with many clients, from tech start-up talent to Fortune 100 talent and we would love to help you market your own skill set to get you seen by hiring managers and recruiters. We specialize in creating great project management resumes and tech management resumes, which means we can help you too!
