Project Manager CV example

What recruiters expect

Before writing anything, it helps to know what the person reading is checking for. In this field that is usually a short, specific list:

• Budget, duration, team size and business area for each significant project.
• Delivery outcomes stated honestly, including variance against plan.
• Governance experience: steering committees, RAID logs, stage gates, benefits realisation.
• Stakeholder seniority - who you report to and who you have to influence without authority.
• Methodology fluency across waterfall and agile, and judgement about when each applies.

Recommended CV structure

This is the running order the example uses. It is a starting point rather than a rule, but the order reflects what tends to be read first in this profession.

1. Profile — Three or four lines positioning you for the role.
2. Core Skills — Grouped skills, for example "Languages" and "Tooling".
3. Professional Experience — Paid roles, in reverse chronological order.
4. Selected Projects — Work you built, with outcomes and the stack used.
5. Professional Qualifications — Completed certifications with the issuing body.
6. Education — Degrees, diplomas and school-leaving qualifications.
7. Languages — Spoken languages with CEFR levels.

Sections worth adding

• Continuing Professional Development — Useful where certification renewal or new framework training is recent.
• Professional Memberships — APM or PMI membership is worth a line in some markets.

Skills worth including

Grouped rather than listed in one block. Grouping makes a long list readable and shows that you can tell the difference between the things you use daily and the things you have touched.

Beyond the technical list: Influencing without authority, Chairing steering committees, Negotiating scope, Delivering bad news early, Coaching project coordinators. These belong inside your experience bullets, demonstrated, rather than in a list of adjectives.

Example professional summary

Three or four lines, positioned for the role rather than describing your personality. Two versions you can adapt:

Project manager with eight years delivering business change and technology projects in logistics and manufacturing. Currently run a portfolio of three concurrent projects with combined budgets of £4.6m and teams of 8 to 22. Recent delivery includes a six-site warehouse management system replacement within its approved budget. PRINCE2 Practitioner and Certified ScrumMaster.

Delivery-focused project manager comfortable in hybrid environments where the plan is fixed and the build is iterative. Eight years across system implementations, site moves and process change, with a record of escalating problems early rather than reporting green until the last week.

Writing your experience

The difference between a CV that gets a call and one that does not is almost always in the bullet points. Each pair below shows a real rewrite of the kind of line that appears on most CVs in this field.

Taken from the example

The sample CV for this profession is fully written. A few sections from it, so you can see the level of specificity that works:

Experience

Senior Project Manager, Meridian Distribution UK

• Run a portfolio of three concurrent projects with combined budgets of £4.6m, teams of 8 to 22 people, and durations between 9 and 18 months.
• Delivered the warehouse management system replacement across six sites, six weeks later than the original plan after a supplier data migration issue, and within the £1.8m approved budget including the change request.
• Escalated a supplier resourcing risk to the steering committee ten weeks before it would have hit the critical path, which allowed a contract variation without extending go-live.
• Negotiated a scope reduction with the operations director that removed two low-value modules and recovered four weeks of schedule.

Projects

• Warehouse management system replacement — Six sites, £1.8m budget, 18 months, team of 22 including three third-party suppliers.
• Transport planning consolidation — Merged three regional planning teams onto a single system, £1.1m budget over 11 months.

Education

• BEng (Hons) Manufacturing Engineering, Coventry University — Upper Second Class (2:1)

Certifications and registration

• PRINCE2 Practitioner — PeopleCert
• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) — Scrum Alliance
• APM Project Management Qualification (PMQ) — Association for Project Management

Common mistakes

ATS considerations

Applicant tracking systems behave differently by sector, and generic advice is often wrong for a given field. These points are specific to project manager applications:

• State certifications exactly: "PRINCE2 Practitioner", "PMP", "Certified ScrumMaster". These are frequently used as hard filters.
• Include "stakeholder management" as a phrase; it appears in the majority of project manager adverts.
• Write budget figures in plain text with the currency symbol so they survive parsing.
• Include both "programme" and "project" if you have programme-level experience, since spelling and scope both vary by employer.

The Minimal ATS layout is built for this, and the ATS guide covers what parsers do to a file in more detail.

Guides that go deeper

This page applies general CV advice to one field. The full treatment of each part is here:

• How to Describe Work Experience — The difference between listing duties and demonstrating impact, and a repeatable way to rewrite any weak bullet point.
• How Long Should a CV Be? — Two pages for most people, and a clear method for getting there when you have more experience than space.
• How to List Skills on a CV — Group them, be specific, and cut anything you would not want to be interviewed on for ten minutes.

Questions about project manager CVs