Construction Project Manager Must-Have Resume Skills and Keywords

Are you interested in improving your job outlook and increasing your salary? How can you demonstrate that you are the most qualified candidate for a Construction Project Manager position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as a Construction Project Manager may be your best qualification, but there are other ways you can also develop your skills, like continuing education or volunteer opportunities. More immediately, however, you can be ready for your next opportunity or promotion by educating yourself about the duties, responsibilities, and required skills of a Construction Project Manager and making sure your resume reflects your experience properly.

In order to do so, you’ll want to know that both employers hiring for a Construction Project Manager and those who list the position of Construction Project Manager on their resumes predominantly feature Project Management and Construction Management as the most common and important terms, respectively. But the list quickly begins to diverge with resumes showing Scheduling, Compliance and Vendor Management at positions three, four and five, while job listings show a different pattern. Do you know what you would list?

We designed the ZipRecruiter Career Keyword Mapper to help you solve this problem and hopefully improve your resume. Using machine learning tools paired with industry research, our Marketplace Research Team helped analyze millions of job postings and resumes to identify the most important keywords related to Construction Project Manager jobs. Our goal is to help you discover opportunities to improve your resume or to help you understand what skills and qualifications you need to be a Construction Project Manager or to advance your career into beyond this role.

The top three keywords employers use in Construction Project Manager job descriptions are Project Management appearing in 29.67% of postings, Construction Management 13.19%, and Scheduling appearing in 9.7%. 52.56% of Construction Project Manager job postings have at least one of these terms indicating the value employers place commonly place on these experiences when hiring candidates. Communication Skills, Vendor Management and Compliance are still quite important, but a smaller sliceof the employer Construction Project Manager job postings with their combined total of 24.58%. At 22.86%, MS Office, Submittals, Technical, and Collaboration appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Construction Project Manager skills and requirements according to employers.

Job seeker resumes showcase a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Construction Project Manager positions. The top three keywords represent 44.01% of the total set of top resume listed keywords. Look to the Resume Checklist below to investigate how Project Management, Construction Management, and Scheduling match up to employer job descriptions. Compliance, Vendor Management, and MS Office represent a very decent share of skills found on resumes for Construction Project Manager with 27.03% of the total. At 28.97%, Technical, OSHA Standards, Collaboration, and Estimating appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Construction Project Manager skills and qualifications found on resumes.

Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in Construction Project Manager job postings since January of 2018, followed by the top 10 skills and qualifications most commonly listed by people who held the title of Construction Project Manager on their resumes.

Our Resume Keyword Checklist is based upon an analysis of the most commonly found terms within both job descriptions and resumes for Construction Project Manager roles. Our algorithm helps isolate phrases and patterns to identify the most frequently recurring and reused keywords from each data source, while correcting for uncommon and outlier results. Various heuristic methodologies are then applied to ultimately create two top 20 lists of the most important and significant skills, certificates and requirements found within Construction Project Manager job postings and resumes. We then merge the two lists together and use a combination of statistics and rules-based scenarios to create a list that is audited by the Marketplace Research team, and finally turned into the checklist you see below. Our hope is that knowing this information can help you make your best impression with your next potential employer.

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the role of Construction Project Manager tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Communication Skills, Detail Oriented, Commercial Construction, Project Management, Submittals, Construction Management, Invoicing, Scheduling, Customer Service, Procurement, Vendor Management, Documentation, Construction Experience, Collaboration, Estimating, MS Office, Compliance, Budget Management, Project Planning or Technical in your background and experience, make sure to highlight the term prominently on your resume. As a job seeker you’ll be competing with many others who are bound to have as many as you (or more!) of these common resume keywords highlighted in their application for a job as a Construction Project Manager.

Employer job listings rarely list Microsoft Project, Quality Control, OSHA Standards or Electricity as important skills or qualifications in Construction Project Manager job descriptions. Nevertheless, job seekers mention them much more commonly in their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a Construction Project Manager role may go unnoticed or even discounted by hiring managers.

At ZipRecruiter, we understand better than anyone the importance of using the right keywords to describe your experience — it’s crucial to attracting the right employers! We built our business on the ability to effectively match job seekers with employers using AI-technology that understands your resume and how likely you are to be noticed by a potential future employer. Having a ZipRecruiter profile that showcases your most relevant skills and abilities can help you get recruited into a new role as a Construction Project Manager. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!