Writing a resume for a Senior Project Manager position requires a clear understanding of the position's skills and proficiencies.

Your next step in life is to get a job as a Senior Project Manager. You know you need to update your resume, apply for jobs, and prepare for interviews. Before you jump on a job board to start looking for new jobs to apply to, you need to be sure you have what it takes. 

Determining your readiness for a new job starts with identifying the Senior Project Manager skills that you have and comparing them to what companies need in new employees. Then, once you have a list of relevant skills, you can add them to improve your resume and increase your chances of landing one of those coveted interviews. 

What makes a project manager senior?

While it may be true that you have years and years of experience, the real test of a Senior Project Manager has to do with the right mix of hard and soft skills. It's easy to list things like budget management, knowledge of project management frameworks, and performance/metrics management on your resume. Those are the hard skills you've learned through education and experience.

The skills that help identify you as Senior involve getting the best out of your team, so you have to have good team-building, communication, and problem-solving skills. These are the skills that you are either good at or not. Yes, they can be fine-tuned and improved, but if you aren't good at resolving conflicts, chances are it'll never truly be in your wheelhouse.

Statistical insight: Research has shown that 92% of project managers think soft skills are just as important, if not more important, than hard skills.

What are the key traits of a good project manager?

As you start to build a list of skills you possess, think of everything you've learned over the years. The list of skills you possess should be fairly long – though not all of it will actually make it onto your resume because keyword stuffing is frowned upon. 

To determine the Senior Project Manager skills to add to your resume, you're going to want to review some job descriptions to find the key traits that employers are looking for. Compare and contrast the key traits you learn about with your own list to determine if you have what it takes. 

The key traits you find in Senior Project Manager job descriptions are likely to be:

  • Leadership

  • Full-cycle project management

  • Budgets

  • Reporting and documentation

  • Resource allocation

  • Team management and coaching

  • Risk assessment

  • Process Improvements

  • Organization & time management

  • Communication

This will be your jumping-off point for writing your resume. 

Senior Project Manager skills & proficiencies

While most of the Senior Project Manager skills you highlight on your resume will fall into a Skills section, you can technically weave keywords and phrases anywhere they make grammatical sense. 

A well-crafted resume skills section that highlights your relevant skills for a senior project manager position will help your resume beat the applicant tracking system (ATS), which is the first step to getting your application noticed. 

Senior Project Manager skills in your resume headline

After your contact information, the first thing that hiring managers will see on your Senior Project Manager resume is a headline. This is sometimes called a title, but there is a difference between a title and a headline. 

  • Title: Senior Project Manager
  • Headline: Senior Project Manager Dedicated to Continuous Improvement

Both have their merits in telling prospective employers what you want to do next in your career, but the headline goes a step further in giving you another opportunity to inject a relevant skill into your resume. 

Related reading: 27 Great Resume Headline Examples to Stand Out

Senior Project Manager skills in your resume profile

After your headline – because you're going to opt for the headline over the title, right? – is your profile paragraph. This is a three to five-sentence paragraph that serves as your elevator speech. It represents your experience level, has a balanced mix of hard and soft skills, and contains at least one achievement that proves your salt as a Senior Project Manager. 

Here's an example of a profile paragraph that contains some of those Senior Project Manager skills we mentioned:

Certified Scrum Master and Project Management Professional dedicated to overseeing and leading full-cycle project management processes, including budget management and resource allocation. Leverage articulate communication skills to translate complex concepts into action plans that are easily understood by all. Consistently use the 3 Ps (people, process, and performance) to manage as many as 10 concurrent projects. 

This profile paragraph contains at least four of the key traits mentioned above, as well as additional skills, some certifications, and an achievement – the ability to handle multiple and concurrent projects. 

Related reading: 27 Great Resume Summary Examples to Get Hired

Senior Project Manager skills in your resume core competencies 

As you continue writing your Senior Project Manager resume, the next thing you should come to will be a list of skills. A lot of people make the mistake of using this Core Competencies section as a dumping ground for everything they know how to do. Don't be that person. 

The Core Competencies section is a list of Senior Project Manager skills that align what you know how to do with what the company needs in a new employee. It truly is just a list, too, and should contain no more than 15 keywords and phrases. This is what resume writers like to call the 'Beat the Bots' section of your resume. 

Here's what yours could look like – as long as it is tailored to the job description you're applying to:

CORE COMPETENCIES:

Project Management | Project Execution | Customer-Facing Solutions | Risk Management | Business Processes | Business Intelligence | Change Management | Team Leadership | Team Development | Transparency | Accountability | Vendor Relations | Process Improvements | Creative Problem Solver

You'll notice that this particular Core Competencies list doesn't contain all of the key traits that we mentioned earlier. This is because some of them are in the headline and profile paragraph, and repetition doesn't earn you brownie points. It could also be that the job description called for different skills. 

This is what “tailoring your resume” means. Just because you know how to do it doesn't mean you should add it to your resume. Your resume MUST speak to the job you're applying for. 

Senior Project Manager skills in your resume professional experience

As you get to the heart of your Senior Project Manager resume, your job of adding the right skills and ATS-friendly keywords and phrases isn't over. Remember, you can wordsmith relevant Senior Project Manager skills anywhere in your resume if they make grammatical sense. 

Here's an example of what your professional experience section could look like – how many of our original key traits do you see?

WORK HISTORY

Company, Inc. | 2016 to 2018

PROJECT MANAGER

  • Created full-fledged implementation plans, accounting for budget restrictions, cost-benefit, and ROI in the management and oversight of $55M+ in retail/construction projects.

  • Negotiated the contractual agreements for strategic and key accounts. 

  • Leveraged transformational leadership tactics to coach and mentor cross-functional teams of 25 direct reports, achieving schedule targets and delivering projects on time.

  • Adjusted project plans to account for dynamic targets, staffing changes, and operational specifications.

  • Increased revenue by $11M for a failing account by authoring and implementing new processes and SOPs.

Even though the title of the position in this work history listing isn't “Senior Project Manager,” the text of the bullets can be adjusted to use the keywords and skills necessary to prove you have what it takes to succeed in a Senior role. In fact, this particular client didn't even know the phrase “transformational leadership” when her resume project started but the fact that it was able to be added gave her another relevant skill on her resume. 

Related reading: Work Experience for a Resume: How to Add it to Get Hired

Senior Project Manager skills in your resume education section

By the time you get to the point of applying for a Senior role, you shouldn't be listing coursework for your bachelor's or master's degree programs. Hopefully, by this time in your career, your experience will trump your education. However, it is still possible to bulk up your Education section with some relevant Senior Project Manager skills. 

You can mention certifications you possess, professional development courses you've completed, or flesh out some details from your degree program if you happened to have just finished it. For example:

EDUCATION & CREDENTIALS

Business Management Degree | Harvard Extension School

  • Expected Graduation: mm/yyyy
  • Relevant Coursework in Marketing, Organizational Behavior, Management, Economics Theory, Emerging Markets, and Management Behavior. 

Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies | Southwest Texas State University

Project Management Professional (PMP) | Project Management Institute

Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM) | Scrum Alliance

Six Sigma Yellow Belt 

Let's say that your bachelor's degree doesn't really fit in with the qualifications that employers want for Senior Project Managers, so you went back to school to get some education in management. That is more important, so it would be listed first. Then, your bachelor's degree and any certifications you have after. 

This particular Education section allowed the following Senior Project Management skills to be added to the resume:

Related reading: How to List Education on Your Resume (with Examples)

Senior Project Manager skills in your cover letter

Your Senior Project Manager resume shouldn't be the only job-search tool in your box. It's important, especially at the senior level, to write a cover letter as well. 

Your cover letter should tell a story that highlights your unique Senior Project Manager skills and traits. Just like with your resume, you'll want to match the skills in your cover letter with skills from the job description, as the cover letter will pass through the applicant tracking system, too. 

As you think about the Senior Project Manager skills you want to call specific attention to, think about instances in your career where you've actually used the skills to achieve some result and tell that story. 

For instance, you might write about a time when you worked through some unforeseen challenges on a particular project by pulling your team together, having weekly pow-wows to solve problems, and thinking outside the box to adjust plans to new strategies. This is a great opportunity to emphasize your leadership and communication abilities and gives you one more chance to prove you're the best candidate for the job. 

The right Senior Project Manager skills make you hireable

They say that finding the right Senior Project Manager is hard because that role is unlike a regular business manager – there are just so many skills a Senior Project Manager needs. At the end of the day, if you can prove you are a great problem-solver who can manage full-cycle projects and lead teams to continuously get better and deliver projects on time, then you'll win the day.

It's all about matching your Senior Project Manager skills with the skills employers seek. 

Not sure how to add these skills to your resume ... or having trouble writing your resume overall. Use our guide to answer your resume questions. 

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