It was a long list when I tried to brainstorm project management skills for my resume (which we in the UK call a CV).
You’ve likely found the same thing when you’re applying for a job. How can you list the necessary project management skills without it becoming a huge list of buzzwords.
Here’s how.
This article:
How to include project management skills in your CV
Which skills should you choose?
Soft skills
Hard skills
Please describe your project management skills
Next steps
FAQWhat skills are required for project management?
How to include project management skills in your CV
Let’s not forget that resume and CV are interchangeable terms.
My CV has a section that covers skills. It’s important to highlight what you can do in job descriptions and project descriptions.
My skill profile is called “Skills Profile”. Below, I list skills that are grouped by:
Interpersonal skills
Leadership
Below each heading is a list of bulletpoints that show how I have demonstrated these skills.
I don’t call out project management skills in my resume. It’s implied in the list below of projects I’ve led.
If you don’t have any work-related projects, however, you can add project managing skills to your resume. This is the bullet point that you would use to talk about your technical skills in project management.
Which skills should you choose?
A CV should only be two pages. I have had to read resumes over 5 pages, and I was genuinely shocked. It’s too many details, and it’s too overwhelming. I was also confused by a lot of the jargon.
You’ll need to be careful about what project management skills you include in your application.
The good news? You don’t have the responsibility of making that call.
To find out what skills the hiring manager is looking to hire, you can use the job listing, job description or personal profile.
Employers often use tools to search for keywords. They will program keywords from the advertisement so that they are the ones to be focused on.
Below are some examples of common project management skills that you can use in your resume.
Soft skills
Soft skills are the hardest part of project management! They are hard to quantify and more related to interpersonal activities and emotional intelligence.
These include:
Communication (written and oral)
Listening
Stakeholder engagement
Conflict management
Negotiation
Influencing
Leadership
Team building
Management of change.
This category also includes ethics, diversity and inclusion, and managing workplace stress.
Hard skills
These are technical skills in project management: things you should do to prove that you can manage a project.
These include:
Scheduling
Time management
Resource management
Project budget management
Scope management
Governance and project security
Risk management
Quality Management
Procurement and supplier/contract management
Management of issues
Configuration management.
Tip: Find out what project methodology your potential employer uses. This will allow you to tailor your application to include agile, predictive, or hybrid methods of working.
Please describe your project management skills
It is not enough to just give a list. It’s not enough to simply give a list. You must also show an example of how that skill looks.
Here’s an example of one bullet point from my CV that falls under the interpersonal skills section.
Excellent communication and presentation skills developed through speaking at conferences, delivering face-to-face and online training, and facilitating workshops within a professional setting.
As you can see, I first name the skill and then explain how I demonstrate it. This is the giv