Development Director 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 Development Director position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as a Development Director 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 Development Director and making sure your resume reflects your experience properly.

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 Development Director 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 Development Director or to advance your career into beyond this role.

Employers require a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Development Director positions. The top three keywords make up 47.94% of the total set of top terms. Look to the Resume Checklist below to see how Collaboration, Fundraising, and Donations shares stack up against the share from resumes. Communication Skills, Grant Writing and Innovation represent an additionally healthy share of the employer Development Director job postings with their combined total of 27.68%. At 24.39%, Proposal Writing, Database, Relationship Management, and Project Management appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Development Director skills and requirements according to employers.

Job seeker resumes showcase a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Development Director positions. The top three keywords represent 42.68% of the total set of top resume listed keywords. Look to the Resume Checklist below to investigate how Fundraising, Donations, and Grant Writing match up to employer job descriptions. Social Media, Collaboration, and Strategic Planning represent a very decent share of skills found on resumes for Development Director with 29.37% of the total. At 27.95%, Project Management, Database, Non Profit, and Customer Service appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Development Director skills and qualifications found on resumes.

Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in Development Director job postings since January of 2018, followed by the top 10 skills and qualifications most commonly listed by people who held the title of Development Director 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 Development Director 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 Development Director 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.

Employer job listings tend to list Communication Skills, Interpersonal Skills, Detail Oriented, Innovation, Collaboration, Alumni Outreach or Proposal Writing as requirements in Development Director job descriptions; however, job seekers mention them far less frequently on their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a Development Director role may help you stand out more to hiring managers.

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the role of Development Director tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Donations, Relationship Management, Technical, Fundraising, Database, Mentoring, MS Office, Facilitation, Grant Writing, Project Management, Non Profit, Committee Management, Strategic Planning, Vendor Management, Public Relations, Newsletter Design or Customer Service 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 Development Director.

Employer job listings infrequently list Social Media or Event Planning as important skills or qualifications in Development Director 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 Development Director 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 Development Director. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!