If you’re putting together an application for a job, you’ve probably found that there is a long list of project management skills to include in your resume (which over here in the UK we call a CV). How do you list the project management skills required without it turning into a giant list of buzzwords?
The job market is tough, so you want your application to stand out, and for employers to see you have the skills required to do the job. Here’s how to manage the skills section on your resume.
How to include project management skills on your CV
Let’s just go with the fact that CV and resume are interchangeable terms for the purposes of this article.
On my CV, I have a section that covers skills. While I try to make it obvious in the job descriptions and project descriptions, it’s worth calling out what you can do by adding a ‘Skills’ heading.
Mine is called ‘Skills Profile’. Underneath, I list skills grouped together by:
- Interpersonal skills
- Leadership
Each of those headings has a list of bullet points underneath that give examples of how I have demonstrated those skills.
I don’t specifically call out the project management skills employers expect you to have on my resume here: it’s implied in the list of projects I have led in the work experience section underneath.
However, if you don’t have work-related projects, you can add project management skills as one of those headings. That’s the bullet point where you’d talk about your ability to do the technical parts of project management.
What skills to choose?
We aim for a CV to be a couple of pages. I’ve had to read resumes that were over 5 pages and frankly I lost the will to live. It’s too much, and too much detail. And there was a lot of
As you want to keep your application concise and to the point, you’ll need to be a little choosy about the project management skills that make it onto your resume.
The good news is that you don’t have to make that call yourself.
Use the job listing, job description, or personal profile to help you uncover what skills the hiring manager is looking for.
Many employers use sifting tools that look for keywords. They will program in keywords from the advert so those are definitely the ones to focus on.
Below, we’ll look at some examples of common project management skills for your resume.
10 soft skills (a.k.a. Power skills) for your resume
Soft skills are actually the hard part of project management! But we call them ‘soft’ because they are difficult to quantify and are more to do with interpersonal activities, emotional intelligence and working together with project teams across the whole project lifecycle.
There’s now a trend towards calling them ‘power skills’ (started, I believe, by PMI) because calling them ‘soft’ makes them seem easy. And you don’t have to work as a project manager for very long before you realize they are truly not easy.
There are 10 examples of power skills included on the list below. I’ve annotated each with an example sentence so you can see how you can illustrate your experience:
- Communication (written and verbal): Excellent communication skills from regularly creating business cases and briefing papers.
- Listening: Set up a feedback loop to collect customer feedback on Project Y.
- Stakeholder engagement: Proficient at stakeholder analysis, RACI chart creation and working with stakeholders at all levels.
- Conflict management: Able to quickly spot conflict, facilitate difficult conversations and prepare options papers to help with resolution, as evidenced by my work on Project Z.
- Negotiation: Negotiated additional resource time for Project B, which meant we were able to deliver on time within the existing scope.
- Influencing: Worked with a challenging stakeholder on Project C, to identify blockers to adopting the change and to resolve them as a team.
- Time management: Experienced at managing my own time and that of others, evidenced through managing multiple projects, consistently hitting personal deadlines and ensuring resources are adequately assigned to project tasks.
- Leadership: Led a cross-functional team of 10+ people to deliver Project A, including multiple workstreams, resulting in our project being nominated for an internal award. (Note, this is not a good place to describe your leadership style e.g. authoritative, collaborative etc — employers aren’t looking for that level of detail and a good project manager should flex their style to fit the situation anyway).
Team building : Organized a team building activity for 15+ people as part of the project kick off for Project X.Change management : Facilitated a change workshop for a group of 35 people affected by the change, resulting in a tailored action plan to help them adopt the change.
Ethics, diversity and inclusion and managing workplace stress all fall into this category as well.
Tip
Many resumes are read by AI these days, so you’ll want to hit all the buzzwords. Don’t assume that the tools used for CV screening are as up-to-date as practitioner practice. For example, we don’t really talk about stakeholder management any longer as the relevant terminology is stakeholder engagement. However, tools might still screen for this, so if you can find a way to mention both terms, you’ve got more chance of passing automated screening.
20 hard skills for your resume
Hard skills are technical project management skills: things you need to do to tick the box to prove you can lead a project. They aren’t necessarily ‘hard’ in the sense that they are difficult. They are ‘hard’ compared to ‘soft’, so if we’re moving to the power skills terminology, we should probably ditch hard skills as well.
On your resume, don’t describe them as ‘hard skills’, stick to terms like technical abilities, core competencies, technical skills, project management techniques or something similar.
This group of skills includes the following items below, which I have listed with some examples of sentences you can use to describe them. Obviously, switch out the sentences to actually describe your own experience:
- Project scheduling: Experienced at building and maintaining Gantt chart project schedules in Microsoft Project and Planisware.
- Resource management: Maintained the resource plan on Project A, regularly working with line managers to secure resources.
- Project budget/financial management: Competent at creating multi-year budgets and completing monthly project finance reporting including actuals and forecasts.
- Scope management: Set up the first official change control process at my company which meant I was able to adequately manage scope changes on Project M.
- Governance and project assurance: Chaired monthly steering group meetings including Board-level members, and completed all PMO-mandated governance steps. Led project peer reviews for my colleagues.
- Risk management: Proficient at managing risk from identification and analysis through to action plan and resolution, including running monthly risk workshops on Project P.
- Quality management: Resolved a quality issue with deliverables by ensuring additional testing was carried out prior to the deliverable being signed off. Setting success metrics for the team which were reviewed quarterly.
- Procurement, and supplier/contract management: Worked with 4 suppliers on Project R to ensure that every vendor deliverable was coordinated and completed on time.
- Issue management: Spotted an issue on Project X that I escalated to the sponsor along with a recommendation for next steps. This was adopted and the issue was resolved before it became a blocker.
- Configuration management: Competent at using Microsoft Sharepoint for document repositories and version controlling files.
Either list out the skills with an example that shows you can demonstrate each, or work these words and explanations into your job history section. As I said above, that’s what I do: the fact I can manage projects is woven all the way through my job history.
I don’t repeat that I do risk management for every project, and you don’t have to either. Think about showcasing one or two skills per job (or project) so overall your CV demonstrates that you can do them all. It would get boring to read about how you engaged stakeholders on every project — employers simply need to see a mention of it.
Tip
Check what project methodology your prospective employer uses. Then you can tailor your application to mention
Other common project management skills
There are so many project management skills that it’s hard to believe one person is ever competent at them all. If the lists above of the most-sought after skills aren’t enough, here are some more you could consider weaving through your application and resume.
- Data analysis
- Use of collaboration tools (honestly, not that looked for any longer — this is considered a hygiene factor for the majority of teams and you’ll just be expected to know how to use them)
- Use of AI tools (but be careful not to make it sound like you just use AI all the time and don’t have any skills yourself)
- Client communication
- Managing project outcomes i.e. benefits realization
- Specific techniques like Earned Value Management, critical path analysis, Monte Carlo simulation (I would only mention your experience in these if the job advert calls for it, or it’s an industry where it would be expected e.g. construction)
- Creating project dashboards.
Describe your project management skills
It’s not enough to simply give a list. Anyone can copy a list of skills from any website or job description. You also need to give an example of what that skill looks like, for you, based on your personal experience.
Here’s a real example of one of the bullet points from my CV that falls into the interpersonal skills section.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills gained from speaking at conferences, delivering online and face-to-face training, and facilitating workshops in a professional setting.
You can see that I name the skill and then describe how I demonstrate it. That gives an employer something to ask about at an interview: “Tell me about a time when you have had to facilitate a workshop.”
It also helps employers understand the scale and scope of your skills. For example, have you run workshops for 5 people or 500? There is no correct answer, but providing some numbers and context helps recruiters understand what you are capable of.
You don’t want to write too much, but you do want to let hiring managers know that you can actually do the skill, and haven’t just copied and pasted it off a list on the internet.
Your next steps
The skills needed for project management jobs vary, so check out what is mentioned in the job posting and think hard about how you can evidence those. Then tailor your resume to highlight the skills that the employer feels are important.
Here are some things to do next.
- Make sure you understand the project management job description so you can check you are listing the most appropriate skills.
- Brainstorm your past experience and consider how to include your work projects in your resume.
- Take a look at the different project management job titles so you know what jobs to apply for.
- Invest some time in updating your resume with project management skills and experience so your application shines.
- Establish what to include on your cover letter, if you are sending one so it’s not a duplicate of your resume. I would recommend highlighting the skills, experience and requirements listed in the job description to show why you are a suitable fit for the role.
Good luck!
Note that the examples above, apart from where I specifically mention it is from my CV, are made up!
FAQ
What skills are needed for project management?
Project management needs a mixture of technical and interpersonal skills including scheduling, team leadership, emotional intelligence, organizational ability, and communication.
What skills should be listed on a PM resume?
Personally, I would list the skills that are asked for in the job description. Use your experience to show that you can do what they are asking for. If you need a starting point, the top skills for project managers include communication, project planning and scheduling, team and task management, leadership, risk management and organization.
How do I quantify my PM skills to strengthen my resume?
Use data where you can e.g. “team of 15”, “budget of $250,000”, “over 3 months” etc. You can use statistics from customer feedback, number of bugs identified and resolved, tickets that got reduced, process improvement time saving.
If you can’t use numbers, what other evidence can you provide? Perhaps your project got nominated for an internal award, you got recognized by the team or your manager, there was a press release in the local paper or something like that.
