Senior Program 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 Senior Program Manager position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as a Senior Program 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 Senior Program Manager and making sure your resume reflects your experience properly.
In order to do so, you’ll want to know that employers commonly feature Collaboration and Program Management as the most prominent terms in their Senior Program Manager job descriptions, yet those who have held the position of Senior Program Manager and list it on their resume indicate Project Management and Technical more predominantly. 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 Senior Program 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 Senior Program Manager or to advance your career into beyond this role.
Employers require a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Senior Program Manager positions. The top three keywords make up 39.58% of the total set of top terms. Look to the Resume Checklist below to see how Collaboration, Program Management, and Project Management shares stack up against the share from resumes. Technical, Innovation and Communication Skills represent an additionally healthy share of the employer Senior Program Manager job postings with their combined total of 33.73%. At 26.67%, Auto Delivery, Facilitation, Compliance, and Customer Service appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Senior Program Manager skills and requirements according to employers.
Job seeker resumes showcase a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Senior Program Manager positions. The top three keywords represent 39.19% of the total set of top resume listed keywords. Look to the Resume Checklist below to investigate how Project Management, Technical, and Collaboration match up to employer job descriptions. Analysis, Program Management, and Compliance represent a very decent share of skills found on resumes for Senior Program Manager with 28.98% of the total. At 31.84%, Vendor Management, Facilitation, Customer Service, and Process Improvement appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Senior Program Manager skills and qualifications found on resumes.
Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in Senior Program 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 Senior Program Manager on their resumes.
Top Senior Program Manager Skills
Skills Required by Employers |
Share |
Collaboration |
13.52% |
Program Management |
13.26% |
Project Management |
12.80% |
Technical |
12.80% |
Innovation |
11.48% |
Communication Skills |
9.45% |
Auto Delivery |
8.80% |
Facilitation |
6.36% |
Compliance |
5.83% |
Customer Service |
5.68% |
Skills Listed by Employees |
Share |
Project Management |
16.07% |
Technical |
11.81% |
Collaboration |
11.31% |
Analysis |
10.10% |
Program Management |
9.99% |
Compliance |
8.89% |
Vendor Management |
8.63% |
Facilitation |
8.12% |
Customer Service |
7.59% |
Process Improvement |
7.50% |
Our Resume Keyword Checklist is based upon an analysis of the most commonly found terms within both job descriptions and resumes for Senior Program 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 Senior Program 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.
Uncommon Keywords on Senior Program Manager Resumes
Job Descriptions
Resumes
Employer job listings frequently list Communication Skills, Detail Oriented or Recruiting as requirements in Senior Program Manager 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 Senior Program Manager role may help you stand out more to hiring managers.
Common Keywords on Senior Program Manager Resumes
Job Descriptions
Resumes
Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the role of Senior Program Manager tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Innovation, Auto Delivery, Program Management, Proactive, Collaboration, Technical, Digital, Project Management, Mitigation, Facilitation, Customer Service, Compliance, Project Planning, Documentation, MS Office, Mentoring, Risk Management or Change Management 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 Senior Program Manager.
Uncommon Keywords on Senior Program Manager Job Descriptions
Job Descriptions
Resumes
Employer job listings rarely list Analysis, Vendor Management, Deployment, Process Improvement, Forecasting or Strategic Planning as important skills or qualifications in Senior Program 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 Senior Program Manager role may go unnoticed or even discounted by hiring managers.
The most common important skills required by employers are Innovation, Auto Delivery, Program Management, Proactive, Collaboration, Technical and Digital. These skills and requirements are just as likely to be mentioned by employers as well as on resumes of people that held a job as a Senior Program Manager, suggesting that having these keywords on a resume are important for success as a Senior Program Manager. Additionally, employer Senior Program Manager job descriptions list Communication Skills as a desirable experience, even though Communication Skills appears 3.07 times less on resumes, suggesting that it's worth considering including this keyword if you possess the experience.
Although you'd probably love to load up your resume with every possible keyword you can, employers tend to look for the things they specify in the job description. Our analysis suggests that highlighting too prominently terms like Analysis, Vendor Management, Deployment, Process Improvement, Forecasting and Strategic Planning may be something to reconsider. These 6 terms appear 2.05, 2.22, 2.33, 2.51, 2.81 and 3.50 times less frequently, respectively, than in job descriptions for a Senior Program Manager position. This indicates that highlighting any of these keywords on your resume may not be a great way to impress a potential employer.
Unless your resume has a good density of the following skills and experience listed, you may not be considered for the role of Senior Program Manager. Make sure to include a strong showing for the following keywords on your resume:
- Innovation
- Auto Delivery
- Program Management
- Proactive
- Collaboration
- Technical
- Digital
- Project Management
- Mitigation
- Facilitation
- Customer Service
- Compliance
- Project Planning
- Documentation
- MS Office
Additionally employers frequently list the following as desirable qualities in a Senior Program Manager candidate, but they are far less common on most resumes:
- Communication Skills
- Detail Oriented
- Recruiting
Finally people who held the position of a Senior Program Manager and list it on their resume are adding these terms that are less likely to be noticed by employers. You may want to consider downplaying these terms on your Senior Program Manager application:
- Analysis
- Vendor Management
- Deployment
- Process Improvement
- Forecasting
- Strategic Planning
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 Senior Program Manager. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!