CV Development for PMO Professionals

Introduce the Role

Let’s start with the basics.

You need to include the date of your role – so that’s Month and Year.

Next is your job title whilst in that role – that’s the actual title you had.

And then the company name.

If you think your job title is misleading or you think it wouldn’t make sense to anyone outside the organisation, you are able to add a more employment market-friendly title in brackets, for example:

04/2018 – Present – Client Engagement Co-ordinator (Project Co-ordinator) – IT Sytems Ltd.

The first example is a simple bullet list.

With this format we’re taking a look back over our notes generated in Module Two when we looked at the personal stocktaking and thinking about the tasks and activities we performed in the role.

There are several ways to think about the ordering:

• Think about your daily, weekly and monthly role and create the list in chronological order.

• Reorder the list each time you apply for a specific role so the ordering is in line with the job advertisement.

• Think about the services offered by the PMO in line with the programme/project delivery lifecycle.

The second example is great for combining several different tasks and activities which produce a certain outcome.

This layout is easy for a hirer to understand what your role consisted of and the types of skills that were combined to carry out the work.

You’ll notice with both these examples so far that the language is project management / PMO focused and not that of the organisation – there are no acronyms or any other company-specific details that a hirer wouldn’t understand.

This particular example works well for project / programme support roles which are not within a PMO – our next example is most more PMO aligned.

This final layout shows how you can present your information in relation to PMO services.

You might opt for this layout if the role you’re applying for details the types of services offered by the PMO.

It makes sense that if a job advertisement is clearly laying out the roles and responsibilities in line with PMO services that your CV should also make these clear.

With this layout you can also tailor your CV each time – adding in and removing services depending on what the advertisement is asking for.

For all three of these examples, the career history focuses more on the types of tasks and activities that you’ve carried out rather than the benefit of having carried them out.

Let me explain that in the next section.

So far the examples cover the roles working within a PMO or supporting a programme/project.

If you’re managing a PMO there is a slight change in how you present your information.

With PMO Management it is imperative that the hirer gets a quick sense of the type of PMO you are managing.

This has a big impact on seniority and salaries/rates of roles too. If the hirer can’t quickly see that you have the experience to operate at a senior leadership level, they will quickly move on to the next CV in the pile.

With these roles, it is a good idea to include details like the number of people in the PMO (being managed by you); the span of control; the budget size; and where the PMO sits within the organisation (the level of seniority and accountability)

Further examples are available here:

[You can download the PMO Management one here]

Let’s take a look at a few real-life examples. First the PMO Manager role.

This example is OK, I would give it about 5 out of 10 – so pretty average.

Here’s why it doesn’t get 10 out of 10:

1. There’s a lot of words and the smaller font is difficult to read (remember, the hirer will be looking at hundreds).
2. It’s a UK CV so Americanisation of words like organization needs to be changed.
3. I have no idea who Lyons Boss are or what they do – not even what sector.
4. A Group PMO means nothing to me – does it mean there are other PMOs in the organisation?
5. What’s the size of the PMO and the accountability levels for this PMO Manager?
6. “Projects delivered on time, within budget and to specification” lots of words to pad it out and are unnecessary.
7. First two paragraphs seem to have been lifted from a job specification and it shows.
8. Management speak – first bullet point – needs to be in Plain English
9. What is Workstack? internal stuff the hirer doesn’t have a clue about.
10. How much of this role is managing projects? The lines seem to be blurring.

With this example, it’s a Project Support role and believe it or not, this is pretty typical of the type of CVs I’ll see.

This example gets about 2 out of 10 in terms of presentation and here’s why it doesn’t get 10 out of 10:

1. No introduction to the organisation or the role they’re performing – it’s difficult to understand what the Project Support Officer is supporting.
2. Much of it is just a list of project artefacts like logs and registers – so what? Tell me what you’ve done with these!
3. No details on the type of tools used – for example, what was used for the plans? Details on tools and techniques matters.
4. No sense of what this person has achieved – or how some of the tasks carried out. Business continuity planning? How did that go?
5. Overuse of project keywords with no context – it could imply that these have been copied from a textbook.

Throughout this session, we have concentrated on the most important part of your career history – the most recent!

This is the one that gets the hirer’s attention first so we spend more time crafting that one.

For the rest of your career history, you’re using the same techniques but you will start to write less and less.

We mentioned before that it is generally the last five years that are the most important to a hirer so we make sure there are enough details covering that period.

Over time, and being mindful that the CV needs to, ideally, fit within 2 to 3 pages, we can reduce our career history to line items.

Finally, in this module here are a few pointers about writing your career history.

1. Make sure you use a range of different adjectives; adverbs and action words in your career history.

Starting every bullet point with ‘managed’; ‘co-ordinated’ or ‘liaised’ obviously gets repetitive after a while so why not take a look at the document to get some inspiration on other words you could be choosing.

[Useful Words for a CV can be downloaded here]

2. Check your spellings

A good tip after using the PC to spell check it is to read the CV backwards! It really does help you spot other typos when you’ve been staring at the same document for a while.

A lot of our work involves communication by the written word so don’t fall into the simple trap of not being shortlisted due to typos.

Your next session will be with you in two days time