Adding Time Management Skills to Your Resume This Year

Time management skills are one of the top abilities hiring managers look for in a resume. How can you highlight time management skills in your resume?

BROWSE EXAMPLES Build my resume

OUR USERS HAVE BEEN HIRED BY

Adding Time Management Skills to Your Resume This Year

Time Management Skills

There are many important skills you need to have if you want to succeed in your chosen industry, and chief among them is being able to get all your important tasks done effectively, without procrastination. In other words, you need to have strong time management skills. If you’re trying to showcase effective time management skills on your resume so that your future employer knows you’re great at them, here’s what you need to know.

Build my resume

What Are Time Management Skills?

Time management skills are simply skills that allow you to use your time more wisely. For example, time management skills allow you to measure your workflow, so you’re not taking on more work than you’re able to. They also help you understand the amount of time that you need to spend on individual projects, as well as which projects you should take on in the first place.

Project management professionals use time management skills all the time. Typically, project management breaks down a large project into smaller tasks, then delegates these specific tasks out to ensure the work gets done in a specific time frame. Even at home, you likely use time management skills to maintain a healthy work-life balance and take control of your time throughout the day.

Time Management Skills To Use for Your Resume

Indicating that you have good time management skills is definitely something you can do, but it’s best to showcase all the different ways you can use time management skills through different soft skills. Here are a few important time management skills that all contribute to your time management abilities:

Prioritization
Multitasking Decision-making
Stress management
Organization (internal and external)
Delegation of duties
Strategy and planning
Problem-solving

Look at all the time management tools you use to avoid time wasters and make sure you’re good at your job. Consider how you avoid distractions, how you approach goal setting, what you do to ignore notifications, and how you make sure you keep phone calls to specific times. All of these things help ensure you have enough time to perform tasks, and therefore they’re a crucial component of your time management skills.

How To Feature Your Time Management Skills in Your Resume

Every job seeker is going to tell a hiring manager that they have better time management than the other job seekers. It’s one of the things that hiring managers are looking for to ensure you don’t waste time during a workday. However, that means they’re also going to be skeptical of anyone who just states these skills without backing them up. Here are a few ways that you can express time management skills without just stating “time management.”

Give examples of how you’ve used time management to complete major tasks – don’t just list skills.
When giving examples, make sure you talk about specifics and give numbers (e.g., “Led team improvement processes that resulted in 30% more efficiency in hitting deadlines”).
Reflect on what the job listing is asking for.

In general, you want to showcase that you’ve actually used these skills in the past. Everyone has had to manage their stress levels or had less time than they thought to work on a project, whether it was academic, work-related, or just a personal project. Showcasing how you’ve used these past experiences to build effective time management skills is the most effective way to express them.

FAQ: Time Management Skills

Q: How do good time management skills benefit me?

Good time management skills make it easier for you to work. If you just incorporate some time management tips into your daily workflow, you’ll likely benefit because it lets you do both the things you like to do and the things you need to do. Plus, because hiring managers value people with great time management skills, it may be one of the traits that can end up getting you the job.

Q: How can I get better at time management?

The first thing you need to do is learn how to prioritize. A tool called the Eisenhower Matrix can help with this. The Eisenhower Matrix, which you may hear called the Urgent-Important matrix, allows you to prioritize tasks by both urgency and importance. Divide your tasks by urgent and non-urgent, then by important and unimportant. Urgent, important tasks are the most important ones to focus on right now. Important, not-so-urgent tasks should be scheduled for a future date. Urgent but less-important tasks are typically best to delegate to other people. Tasks that are neither urgent nor important should take the least important prominence—while they can be important for stress management, you should avoid doing them on the clock.

You can also consider downloading time management apps that can help you create a more effective workspace. Whether they’re apps that block internet access for a period of time, make it difficult to use your phone, or help you wake up at the right time of day, time management apps can help you with work and similar tasks that you need to do in the short-term.

Q: What can I do to make my time management skills look better?

Make sure you use the tips from this page, as well as the ResumeHelp resume builder and its job-specific suggestions, to feature time management skills more effectively. By sprinkling your time management abilities throughout your resume, you’ll be able to showcase your skills, not just state them.

Move your resume to the top of the yes pile!

Get Started