INSIDE THE

Focus on Leadership Capabilities for a Career Change

Are you describing yourself as a Director, Manager, Supervisor, or a Team Lead on your cleared resume? It doesn’t matter if you are a help desk team lead supervising other support colleagues, or a project manager who manages cross-functional colleagues. Showcasing your ability to lead is an important tool in your cleared job search. You may be missing out on powerful and descriptive key word skills in your cleared resume.

Director: a person that directs; one of a group of persons chosen to control or govern the affairs of a company; in most cases, has oversight to one or more managers who focus on specific business units within the institution.

Manager: a person who has control or direction of an entire or part of an institution, business, or a project or program; a person who manages.  A manager may have one or more subordinates who supervise smaller groups of workers.

Supervisor: a person who supervises workers or the work done by others. A person who oversees a sub-set of a business unit or project.

Team Lead / Project Lead: a person who leads or liaises between other members of a group who may have a set of subject matter expertise all working together to achieve a specific or ongoing goal or a specific set of tasks within a project and may be responsible for reporting stages or team results to management.

It is important to note if you are working in any of these capacities on your resume, because it indicates capabilities of taking direction in an assignment, project, or program and leading others to performing and reaching a strategic goal or for accomplishing project tasking. Indicating on your resume you could manage or direct the workers to achieving the goal in a specific time-period, or accomplish a deliverable within or before the deadline, will provide the metrics to document your capability to achieve strategic goals and tasks.

No matter what your job is in your resume, hiring managers are looking for the answer to the following types of questions to find indicators of leadership and experience in management. Adding metrics (numbers) to document the value of those achievements and activities increases the value of your participation in the management / leadership position.

• Did you manage or supervise others – if yes, how many, what are/were their functional job titles or responsibilities?
• Do you train or mentor (formally or informally) subordinates or peers? Do you develop the training curriculum? How often do you train per topic, to XX of learners per class, for a total of about ## classes over XX years, and circa XX total learners trained?
• What was the value of the equipment, contracts, or programs/projects over which you supervised, managed, or in which you participated?
• What budget did you oversee (e.g., annually $XXXX)? How did you ‘stretch’ the budget to meet goals of department or ‘company’ per se?
• Where/how did you save money for your employer – or – the employer’s client? How much total money did you save? What did you do to accomplish unique jobs/tasks that saved money for your employer or client(s) during tenure?
• What estimated amount of (project?) work did you / does your ‘team’ accomplish daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually?
• What new processes did you instill and what were results? What was saved (man-hours, budget money), or what did the processes increase (productivity)? How did you personally have a hand in accomplishing those savings or instilling processes?

Most businesses and employers are seeking a solution to a problem. They need a warm body in an empty seat to perform tasks, and achieve the completion of responsibilities in that job. The more leadership capabilities that new hire has, in performing non-supervised tasking, and/or to increase productivity by encouraging and challenging others to achieve more, the better for the hiring company.

Review your resume and look for areas where you did take the leadership role in your current or past employment positions, and ensure they are written to focus on your management skills.

Dawn Boyer, Ph.D., owner of D. Boyer Consulting – provides resume writing, social media management and training, business development, human resources consulting, and print-on-demand consulting. Reach Dawn at [email protected].