How to Write an Engineering Manager Resume or CV
Here is how to get your engineering manager resume or CV ready.? Consider your resume as a sales sheet, aka a product datasheet – and you are a product!
Resume Format
You want a resume that is easy to scan and read. An automatically generated resume from LinkedIn is a great place to start and you can easily add details from there. You can create a free resume from your LinkedIn profile using LinkedIn Resume Builder. Another paid alternative is Standard Resume which has easy-to-read templates for engineers and other tech professionals.
The best resumes are one to two pages long. Longer resumes are more difficult to go through. Employers spend six seconds on average scanning each resume, so you need be strategic! Your resume shouldn't include everything you've ever done. You can create a longer resume if you have many years of experience. But it wouldn't help you and could definitely make things worse. In general, people don't attach much weight to your accomplishments and jobs from more than ten years ago. They are also unlikely to be relevant.
The most important things you will want to make easy to find are your contact info; your most recent positions including title, company name, and location; how many people or teams you are capable of managing; and education.
Resume Sections
Your resume should include the following sections: contact information, resume summary, optional objective (see below), work experience, skills, and education.
Contact Info
Include all your contact information at the top, including your location, phone number, email (make sure your email address looks professional), and LinkedIn profile. This makes it very easy for hiring managers and recruiters to contact you. Make sure any additional links, such as those to a portfolio, personal website, or GitHub profile, are pertinent before including them. If someone clicks on a link and it is empty, or the website does not look professional or impressive, it can do you more harm than good. An example of this would be a GitHub or Twitter profile with very little activity and followers.
Resume Summary and Objective (optional)
Your overview and recent experience should make it abundantly obvious that you are looking for an engineering leadership position and what kind. If you are making the switch into management from e.g. most recently a tech lead or if you were a manager before but switched and want to switch back, add a section for objective that explains the kind of engineering manager job you are seeking. This also makes it crystal clear that you do not want to stay on as tech lead or IC but rather want to become an engineering manager.?
On the other hand, if you already have experience and have held the position of engineering leader in your most recent roles, a brief career summary block will be more relevant.
I think it is best to position yourself as a manager within a few specialties, e.g., DevOps, Front-end Engineering, ML, etc. where you have relevant experience, and highlight those experiences. While engineers can often be hired as generalists within a given department and later assigned to teams, management positions are usually specific to a team and a business need. A company may have a particular group that they need a new manager for or to grow a new team with specific capabilities—therefore, positioning yourself as a generalist is less likely to match those job requirements and stand out. The closer you can position yourself to the job opening, the more likely it is to get in the door.
Work Experience
List your experiences in reverse chronological order. Focus on the items that are relevant to the next job that you want. If you are new to management or worked as a tech lead, I would focus on managerial accomplishments over technical ones whenever possible, e.g. people management, working with cross-functional teams, setting strategy, etc.
Consider a human resume reviewer who is examining hundreds of resumes at once.
领英推荐
Make sure that your career progression is traceable in your resume. If you worked in one company for a long time, it would be helpful to explain how your role changed through this period. Mention if you were promoted or changed teams. If you won any awards this is also definitely worth calling out. If your number of direct reports grew, you should mention that. Include the number of teams and people you managed.
Focus on the effect and impact of your work and your team's work, not just what you did. Metrics are good to share here, e.g., increased performance by x%, reduced costs by y%, increased sales, grew the team from X to Y, etc.?
Use the X-Y-Z formula recommended by Google recruiters, "Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z]." Avoid mentioning obvious responsibilities like 1-1 meetings, hiring, writing reports, etc., that all managers do unless there is something special you want to call out. Instead, focus on what you drove!
Finally, your resume will be the foundation for the questions that are asked, so be prepared to explain any job gaps in your employment history. You don't have to call them out in the resume, just be prepared to discuss if asked.
Skills
Include a skills section with relevant keywords and technologies. For brevity remove any skills details that are not necessary. For instance, it usually doesn't matter what version of Java or PHP you or your team used in the past. Technologies that are no longer widely used can also be dropped.
Depending on the job, certifications might be relevant, and if so I would list them. However, I often see certifications that are not relevant and those can actually weaken the resume. I would avoid any certifications that are very easy to get, e.g. a simple 1-2 day online course.
Education
List your education. Unless you are new to the workforce, there is no need to add more details beyond the school and degree. In general, people either don't care about school projects, college activities, or grade point averages after you have been working for several years. Only include your GPA if you are new to the workforce and it is very high. Unless the graduation year is recent, there is no benefit to including the year. In fact, if the graduation year is far in the past it can even hurt you due to the prevalence of ageism.?
Other Resume Sections
Volunteerism can give insight into your personality and your life outside of work but I would add only if there is space. Similarly, hobbies and side projects can be omitted unless they are related to the job or highlight some extraordinary achievement that makes you stand out.?
Closing Advice on Engineering Manager Resumes
Don't forget to use grammar, style, and spell-checking software on your resume. Utilize resources like Grammarly. Have a native English speaker proofread your resume. The presence of typos and spelling errors on a resume may cause some hiring managers to immediately reject it. Additionally, because people helping scan resumes frequently have a large number of resumes to sort through, they are quick to find reasons to toss out a resume.
Run your resume through software that will check how your resume will be picked up by Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). ATS are recruiting software that companies use to sort through qualified candidates. Your chances of landing an interview depend on your resume making it through these systems. The most popular of these tools is https://www.jobscan.co/.
For more info on cracking the engineering manager interview, please check out my site at managersclub.com and book The Engineering Managers Interview Guide on Amazon.