<p>The CV is a vital part of applying for an <a href="/jobs/s-it/ss-management/r-it-project-manager/">IT project manager job</a>, and it's important that any applicant take the time to ensure that their CV accurately reflects their skills and previous achievements. Any effective project manager's CV should address the following areas:</p>
<h3>General points for IT project manager CVs.</h3>
<p>It's important to remember that the CV should present an air of genuine professionalism and authority. The design should be clean and forensically examined for grammar and spelling errors. It's also important to minimise anything that's not necessary: an effective CV should be as short as it can be without missing essential information. Two pages is the ideal maximum length.</p>
<p>Our tech recruiters outline their top CV writing tip here:</p>
<h3>IT project manager job specifics.</h3>
<p>An IT project manager's CV should cover a few specific areas:</p>
<ul>
<li>candidate summary</li>
<li>skills summary</li>
<li>previous successes</li>
</ul>
<p>Firstly, it should contain a summary of the candidate, and list their main skills, preferably in around four short paragraphs. These mini summaries should note the main skills that the candidate has, and how they've been used. For example:</p>
<p>“Experienced project manager with 10 years leading successful projects across diverse areas of business.” Or “Business strategist skilled at planning multi-million pound projects whilst aligning business needs with technology solutions in order to improve processes.”</p>
<p>These paragraphs should let the person responsible for hiring know immediately what the candidate can bring to their firm. Essentially, they're there to grab attention and demonstrate achievement in as economical fashion as possible.</p>
<h4>Skills summary.</h4>
<p>This is another important part of any IT project manager's CV, and is the ideal place for the candidate to summarise their skill-set to date. Quite often, the most effective way to do so is to simply list the skills in bullet-point form. This is especially the case if the candidate has a lot of skills that are all relevant to the role they're applying for.</p>
<p>It's often effective to separate the skills under the main general skill-sets. For instance, the applicant's CV could highlight 'Leadership' under which would fall skills like team building and mentoring, client relations and planning; 'IT project lifecycle management' under which would fall things like budgeting and costing, ROI analysis and testing and then 'Project Management' itself, under which would fall skills such as custom software development, database design and systems engineering. This umbrella separation will help keep the applicant's CV looking clean and logically constructed.</p>
<h4>Previous successes.</h4>
<p>The CV should also focus on previous projects, with the applicant trying to be as specific as possible about major projects they've been involved with (ideally, they should focus on the top two or three, with the most recent first). The focus should be on what the project was, who it was for and exactly what the applicant's role was in ensuring the project was completed.</p>
<p>Finally, the CV should always represent a career progression, showing previous roles, and wherever possible demonstrate that the candidate has continued to learn new skills and develop themselves. Any awards or qualifications should also be listed.</p>
