Engineers often focus on developing industry-specific skills to advance their careers. Studies show, however, that business skills are more in demand for management and leadership positions.
If you’re hoping to become an engineering manager, here’s an overview of the role, four essential elements your resume needs, and how you can reach your managerial potential.
What Does a Manager Do?
It’s difficult for many managers to describe what their roles entail. This is because they perform so many daily tasks that it can be challenging to communicate how they all fit into one position.
Although managers’ tasks vary, their primary responsibility is coordinating others’ actions to accomplish organizational goals and objectives.
According to Harvard Business School Online’s course Management Essentials, managers assume multiple roles within their organizations, including:
- Organizer
- Supervisor
- Problem-solver
- Leader
- Decision-maker
- Strategist
- Negotiator
- Mentor
- Coach
- Cheerleader
As a result, management isn’t just a role or job title but also a set of processes requiring oversight from skillful, agile professionals.
“Processes are collections of tasks and activities that together, and only together, transform inputs into outputs,” HBS Professor David Garvin says in Management Essentials.
If you want to become an effective manager, it’s critical to demonstrate your experience and expertise in four processes:
- Decision-making
- Implementation
- Organizational learning
- Change management
Showcasing experience in these processes on your resume can give you an edge in the job market and display your engineering leadership abilities to prospective employers.
4 Elements Every Management Resume Needs
1. Examples of Decision-Making
Decision-making is an essential process managers and leaders perform. According to Management Essentials, decision-making is identifying problems or opportunities and choosing from various courses of action.
If you’re an engineer who makes lower-level decisions related to project-specific initiatives rather than organizational ones, it’s still important to note those on your resume. Hiring managers value experience in overcoming the common decision-making challenges leaders face, such as:
- Adverse team dynamics
- Status differences
- Contrasting opinions
According to HBS Professor Amy Edmondson, who’s featured in Management Essentials, creating a psychologically safe environment is often the answer to these problems.
“Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking,” Edmondson says in the course.
Such environments foster trust and respect by allowing group members to state their opinions without fear of retribution. You can help create the right decision-making environment for your team by:
- Reducing perceived status differences: Admitting your fallibility encourages others to do the same—making it safe for team members to share their ideas.
- Ensuring everyone’s ideas are valued: To engage employees, ask open-ended questions to inspire creativity and invite their participation.
- Meeting informally: Meeting in an informal environment ensures team members get to know each other and create more personal connections.
Highlight instances where you encouraged team-wide discussions around projects or products on your resume. Include important connections you created with team members that resulted in cross-departmental collaboration. Those seemingly small experiences indicate that you understand managers’ role in the decision-making process.
2. Experience in Strategy Implementation
Strategy implementation is a key management competency. According to Management Essentials, the implementation process involves effectively and efficiently executing strategies and plans.
Engineering professionals take part in implementation at almost every level. This ensures prospective managers have demonstrable experience in strategy implementation.
“Effective implementation is delivering what’s planned or promised on time, on budget, at quality, and with minimum variability—even in the face of unexpected events,” Garvin says in Management Essentials.
Include past projects on your resume that demonstrate your role in strategy implementation. Those examples can offer insight into your understanding of goal setting and defining deliverables in business strategies.
“Success has to be measured against pre-established goals and targets,” Garvin says in Management Essentials. “If people don't know what their goal looks like, they’re not likely to get there.”
3. A Pattern of Organizational Learning
According to Lorman Education Services, 74 percent of employees feel they aren’t reaching their full potential due to a lack of development opportunities. This is often caused by management’s tendency to prioritize urgency over importance. Despite this trend, more companies are embracing the importance of continuous organizational learning.
According to Management Essentials, organizational learning is the process of acquiring, interpreting, and applying new information and ideas to perform effectively, make improvements, or innovate. In engineering, this is particularly important when considering technology’s constant evolution, modes of working, and organizational systems.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that continuous learning is, in fact, a necessity for sustainable performance and long-term success for you as individuals, as well as for organizations,” Garvin says in Management Essentials. “This is because learning is implicitly part of every process a business conducts.”
If you’re hoping to transition to an engineering management position, leverage educational opportunities offered by your organization. Those experiences can teach you new skills and behaviors and bolster your employees’ professional and personal development.
4. A Background in Change Management
Change management can be difficult for prospective engineering managers to include on their resumes because it’s often the most fundamental, demanding job they have.
According to Management Essentials, change management is guiding or leading an organization through internal or external transitions or shifts. It requires designing, directing, and shaping change processes.
Even if you don’t play a vital role in your organization’s shifts, you can showcase your capability to do so on your resume by noting your execution skills. According to Management Essentials, execution skills in the change management process include five components:
- Knowing the forces of change to anticipate when your company must adjust
- Understanding different types of change to identify what needs to be done
- Being aware of how to appropriately sequence activities
- Having sensitivity to barriers that impede change to overcome resistance
- Deploying the levers that make a change initiative more likely to succeed
Organizational change is challenging at all levels. Outline your role in change management initiatives on your resume to showcase your ability to achieve results, even in the most difficult circumstances.
Showcase Your Managerial Potential
Advancing your engineering career can seem daunting. In many cases, your foundational engineering education isn’t enough to advance since management and leadership roles often require business acumen.
Furthering your knowledge can enable you to overcome this obstacle and experience several benefits. Beyond building your resume, it can greatly affect your earning potential. According to job search site Zippia, 21 percent of engineering managers advance their education beyond a bachelor’s degree, earning among the top salaries in the industry.
One way to acquire business skills is by taking an online certificate course, such as Management Essentials, in which you can learn more about how to leverage organizational processes to build your resume and prepare for managerial roles.
Are you ready to become a manager? Enroll in our online certificate course Management Essentials—one of our leadership and management courses—and develop in-demand business skills that can benefit your engineering career. If you aren’t sure which HBS Online course is right for you, download our free flowchart to explore your options.
