Technical Manager CV Example

A technical manager CV that includes all the necessary details and is tailored carefully to the job description puts you in a great position. It can help you pass the ATS screening stage, make a strong impression with the employer and reach the latter stages of the recruitment process. Let’s break down the core components of a CV and examine how to build them effectively.

Main sections of a technical manager CV

Your approach to creating your winning technical manager CV will differ depending on your experience, your seniority and the details listed in the job description.

However, no matter where you are in your career, a technical manager CV must present a clear, compelling narrative of your professional journey. To help you build that story, we’ll now break down the document piece-by-piece—from the initial contact header to your most significant career milestones.

CV Header

Start your technical manager CV by adding a professional-looking header that contains all your relevant contact information. Include your name, email address, phone number and location (your full address isn't typically necessary for UK job applications). Additionally, listing your LinkedIn profile in your CV header can be valuable. It serves to provide more detailed information about your career journey, your qualifications and your industry standing, in an easily accessible way.

For jobs in the UK, a personal photo is usually not required on your CV. That, along with any other personal details such as age, gender, ethnicity and nationality, are generally discouraged under the terms of the Equality Act 2010, which aims to reduce and eliminate discriminatory practices, such as recruitment bias.

CV Summary

Underneath your contact information, write a brief CV summary or CV objective to introduce yourself and highlight a few key skills and qualities. This can help the employer to quickly form a first impression on your suitability for the technical manager role. While a CV summary showcases your key skills and achievements in the context of your career to date, a CV objective provides an alternative approach. It focuses instead on your ambitions for the future, making it ideal for junior candidates without much work experience.

Whether you choose to write a summary or an objective, aim for a length of two or three sentences, introducing your key skills, unique qualities and key achievements or ambitions, making sure they reflect what's included in the job description.

The most effective way to approach a CV summary is to focus on one or two key skills that reflect the requirements of the job description and show how you've used them to create positive outcomes for previous employers. You'll also want to showcase your unique personal strengths, and touch on how they've contributed to your career progression up to now. Find an example below of a positive technical manager CV summary, characterised by evidence to support your claims and well-structured, easy-to-read sentences.

Above is an example of a less effective CV summary, with some subtle, yet notable differences. Your summary could miss the mark if it's too generic and doesn't describe unique personal qualities and strengths. It might also be vague, use long, unstructured sentences, lack quantifiable evidence of your impact, or not be tailored to the job description.

Professional Experience

A CV's work experience section is usually its most important element. Employers will want to see how you've developed relevant skills in previous roles, and how you've put them to good use in successful projects and career achievements. Always take the time to tailor this section, including keywords and phrases that match the job description. This will help employers to judge how strong a fit you are for the role, and how you might apply your skills for the benefit of the organisation.

Create a list of all your most relevant roles, going back up to 10 or 15 years if necessary. Include your job title, the name of the employer, its location and the dates you worked there. Include bullet points that explain how you put your skills to good use in each previous role.

What differentiates an excellent work experience section from an average one is the use of action verbs and quantifiable evidence, showing how your actions led directly to positive results in previous roles. You'll also want to show how you've added relevant skills and increased your impact throughout your career progression. Take a look at an example of a strong technical manager CV work experience section below.

Above is an example of what not to do with your technical manager CV. A less-effective work experience section could focus too much on irrelevant or out-of-date roles, or include generic information about your responsibilities that fails to show the impact you made. It might lack tailoring to the job description or fail to provide evidence to support the claims made in the bullet points.

Education

In your education section, list any formal qualifications you've gained, particularly those that are most recent or required for the role.

To be eligible for technical manager positions, you typically need to have a relevant university degree, and include it in your CV. If you have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science or another related degree that qualifies you for the role, you should definitely mention it in your CV, along with any other degrees or qualifications that highlight your most relevant skills, such as software development life cycle or cloud infrastructure architecture design.

When listing your qualifications in your education section, select only the most suitable qualifications and list them in reverse-chronological order, starting with the most recent and working backwards. For each entry into your education section, add the qualification name and level, the institution or awarding body, its location and your dates of study or graduation. For extra emphasis on your education section, include bullet points showcasing projects you worked on, modules you studied, awards you won or societies you participated in, if they help you to prove you're a suitable candidate.

Specialist licences or certifications can also be a valuable addition to your CV's education section. If these are essential for the job and are referenced in the job description, it's a good idea to include them here rather than further down your CV. Include any expiration or renewal dates for certifications, if applicable.

Key Skills

Your CV's skills section CV's skills section is a great place to showcase some of the key skills necessary for the role. Check the job description to understand which skills are most essential, and provide a combination of hard and soft skills, reserving space to include some unique qualities that can help you to stand out from the competition. For a technical manager CV, it's valuable to highlight essential skills from your skill set, such as stakeholder management and software development life cycle, to grab the attention of hiring managers and show you're qualified for the technical manager position.

Hard Skills

Hard skills and technical skills are specialist skills that are essential for carrying out the main responsibilities of the role. You might acquire hard skills through study, or through on-the-job training, and some hard skills may require a certification or licence. For technical manager jobs, essential hard skills from your career-to-date might include agile project management methodologies, and software development life cycle. Check the skills specified in the job description, and add four or five key hard skills to your CV that show employers you're capable of completing the key duties of the role.

The best hard skills section would be based around skills listed as 'essential' or 'required' in the job description. To give yourself the best chance of success, you'll want your strongest skills to match closely with those most desired by the employer, and your hard skills list should reflect this.

Take a look below to see the type of skills that are commonly listed in a technical manager CV hard skills section:

Soft Skills

Soft skills are the personal strengths and qualities that show employers how well you'll fit into the role and complement other members of the team. Soft skills tend to be more transferable and applicable to different roles than hard and technical skills. Transferable skills are among the most in-demand skills for employers, with rapidly changing and evolving ways of working requiring ever-more flexible and adaptable employees. Soft skills are also highly valuable for junior and entry-level positions, where candidates aren't expected to have a wealth of relevant work experience and career achievements.

Just like the hard skills section, begin by reviewing the job description to learn the most desirable soft skills to include in your technical manager CV. Only add soft skills that you can provide evidence for throughout your CV. Draft a list of up to five key soft and transferable skills, combining the most essential skills from the job description with your strongest personal qualities.

Explore the examples below to identify soft skills commonly presented in a technical manager CV.

Language Skills

If you speak any additional languages, you might want to consider adding a languages section to your CV. Even if languages aren't a requirement of the job description, speaking a foreign language can reflect well on you as a candidate, and correlate with other soft skills that can increase your employability. Within this section, list the foreign languages you speak to a reasonable degree of competence, together with an indicator of your skill levels.

There are several ways to cite your proficiency in foreign languages. Firstly, you could use a simple descriptive word to indicate your abilities, such as:

• English: Fluent
• Spanish: Intermediate

Alternatively, use an internationally recognised framework for languages, such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). This gives your language skills a standardised competence indicator, as follows:

• A1: Beginner
• A2: Elementary
• B1: Intermediate
• B2: Upper intermediate
• C1: Advanced
• C2: Proficiency

Certifications and Licences

If you have extra qualifications beyond the basics of what's expected or required for the role, you might want to include a separate certifications section in your CV. It can be a valuable way of differentiating yourself from other candidates and showing employers your dedication, motivation and commitment to professional development. Furthermore, a certifications section is particularly valuable if you're applying for a role that sets out required certifications or licences in the job description. These might include technical roles that require the use of specialist software or equipment.

Here is a list of some key certifications and licences that can be particularly useful for technical manager applications:

Optional Sections

Including optional sections in addition to the core elements of your technical manager CV can help you provide further evidence of your suitability for the role. If you're unable to show you have all the necessary skills for the job through your work experience, optional sections can be a valid way of providing further evidence of your suitability, to give you the chance of gaining an interview. If you're an entry-level candidate or a career changer, optional sections can be particularly valuable.

Explore our career resources for practical strategies to make your CV stand out and move you closer to landing an interview.

Hobbies and Interests

If you have any hobbies and interests that can showcase skills relevant to the job description, it might be worth including them. In addition, you can use hobbies and interests to show elements of your personality that might not shine through otherwise, giving you a chance to offer something different to most candidates. However, a hobbies and interests section will only make an impact with the reader if the skills you showcase are relevant to the role. As such, only include this section if it helps you fulfil requirements of the role that you've been unable to show elsewhere.

Key Achievements

Listing your key career achievements in a distinct section can be an effective way of drawing attention to them. Add any awards you've won or career milestones you've reached, so employers can easily see the impact you've made in your career to date.

Volunteer Roles

Listing any previous voluntary work is another useful way of showing you have the necessary skills and experience for the job. If you don't have much relevant work experience, either because you're a junior candidate or you're changing jobs from an unrelated field, volunteering can provide valuable examples of your skills in action. Approach your volunteering section in much the same way as your work experience section.

For each entry, include a job title or description of your role, the organisation, its location and the dates you volunteered. Adding bullet points can also help you to show how you developed relevant skills, and used them to good effect.

Most impactful action verbs for a technical manager CV

Starting each of your work experience bullet points with strong action verbs is a great way to showcase your key skills and qualities, and demonstrate the impact they've had in your career to date. Start each bullet point with a verb linked to the skills required in the job description, to add focus to your work experience section and make it easy for the reader to identify your strengths. Remember to always back up the action verbs you use with quantifiable evidence that shows the impact you made. You can use past tense for any action verbs describing previous jobs, with present tense for action verbs to describe your current role and responsibilities.

Technical manager CV example

Now we've shown you everything that needs to go into your technical manager CV, we can take a look at how it comes together in its final form in the following example:

If you want to get a feel for how your CV will look once you finalise its design and layout, check out our CV examples for inspiration.

Tips for optimising your CV for ATS

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are now commonly used by employers, to help them manage the recruitment process. One of the main functions of ATS software is the scanning and ranking of CVs according to their likely suitability for the role. By taking on this task, the hiring manager can reduce the time and resources they spend on the initial selection process, making recruitment more efficient and cost-effective.

Because ATS software is becoming more common in the recruitment process, it's important to make some concessions in your CV to give yourself the best chance of progressing beyond the initial screening. With that in mind, here are some tips on preparing your CV for ATS screening:

• Include keywords and phrases that mirror the job description, increasing your chances of ranking highly in the ATS screening stage.
• Use clear, standard CV headings that are easily recognisable, such as 'work experience', 'education' and 'skills'.
• Choose a simple, standard CV structure and omit any design elements that might make your CV less easy to read by automated systems, such as text boxes and columns.
• Select a font that increases the readability of your CV, such as popular serif and sans serif fonts, between the sizes of 10 and 12 for main text and 14 and 16 for headings.
• Use bullet points in place of full sentences and paragraphs. This can reduce the overall length of the document, make the keywords stand out and make it easier for ATS apps to scan.

You might feel there are a lot of things to remember when writing an ATS-compatible CV, but with just a few small tweaks, you can ensure yours passes this stage. Use one of our expert-designed, ATS-compatible CV templates to avoid the stress of adapting your CV for ATS screening.

Key takeaways for a winning technical manager CV

For the best chance of impressing employers, always tailor your CV for every application and include keywords and phrases that reflect the job description. Choose the most fitting CV format for your experience level, and focus on showcasing how you've developed the necessary skills for the role, and used them to positive effect in previous roles.

Finally, using a clean, professional CV template like those offered by Jobseeker, can help your CV stand out among its competitors and give you the best chance of success with your applications.

Sources:

1. Barnet Council (UK local government), Recruitment tips: How to write a supporting statement
2. Jobseeker, Recruitment Statistics