Improving your Project Management resume

So you want to improve your Project Management resume. The best way to do that is to start at the end.

What’s the end game?

Where are you trying to get to? Do you want to be delivering digital transformation programmes that span many years? Do you want to be known as the go-to for moving workloads to the cloud? Do you want to get out of project management and progress into a CIO position? Do you want to land a dream job at a particular company?

The sort of experience you are going to need, to improve your CV in the right way, will depend on the end point you want to get to. If you want to be known for moving workloads to the cloud, you need more of those types of projects. If you want to land a job at a product company, you need experience running projects in a product-centric environment. You have to start with the end in mind.

Read the job ads

If you now know where you’re trying to go to, find some job ads for that place you’re trying to go. If you want to be the CIO, find half a dozen job adverts for CIO positions in the sorts of companies you would want to work. That last part is important. No point finding job adverts for a public sector organisation if you want to be the CIO of a bank.

When you’ve got a few job ads together, what do they have in common? What are the common experiences they are looking for and the common skills they are looking for? Make some notes of the common expectations people have when they’re recruiting for these types of roles.

How do you match up?

Where are the gaps between the requirement and your current experiences? If it’s duration of experience, then you have a bit more time to pass under your belt. If it’s size of projects (must have managed projects with budgets in excess of $100m), then you need to work on some larger projects.

You need to be harsh when you’re looking at the gaps. It’s easy to think “I haven’t done that but I know I could”. You might be right, but that isn’t going to get you off the CV pile and into an interview. You need to be hard on yourself on what the gaps are. Write them down.

Plan to close the gap

Final step - what are you going to do to close the gap? What’s the next experience you could add to your resume, that will move you closer to the end state that you want to get to?

If you’ve only managed $1m projects and your dream role requires experience managing $100m projects, plan the steps. Maybe your next step, the next experience you need on your CV, is a $5m project. Then $10m. Then $25m. All of these steps will also give you time to validate that, as the money gets bigger and the stakes get larger, that you still enjoy this sort of work.

If your dream job is to be the go-to for cloud deployments, and your dream job needs you to have experience with 3 different cloud companies, but you only have experience with one, maybe your next step is to do a cloud migration to a cloud company that you haven’t migrated to before.

You can do the same exercise for skills as you can for experience. If a skill is managing strategic vendor contracts - try to maneouvre so that your next project is one that has a vendor on it. If a skill is influencing without control, try working on a project where you have no team and must motivate other teams that you don’t control to do the work.

If you’re deliberate about the exercise, clear on where you want to go, clear on the gaps you have in arriving at that destination, it will be clear to you what you need to do to improve your resume.