Whether on the front end or the back end, office managers are a critical part of handling the inner workings of businesses on a day-to-day basis. Having an interest in details, a penchant for accuracy, and familiarity with technical tools will all serve you well as an office manager.
Office managers could work in a number of industries, from medical offices to hotel offices to factories. There are skills between office manager positions that are transferable, including attention to detail, teamwork, and leadership, meaning you should be able to comfortably change industries once you’ve gained experience.
Some hard skills will also transfer, including Quickbooks or Microsoft Access, operating office machinery, and handling incoming customer or client contacts. Other skills or tools relate more directly to specific industries, such as medical coding software, Oracle PeopleSoft, and transcription software, and these won’t be as transferable.
The type of office manager position you’re applying for is thus the first clue as to the kind of skills you should include. In this guide, we’ll review four templates for office managers in different industries to give you a solid starting point, followed by examples of skills and action verbs you should emphasize.
Office managers handle a range of duties depending on their industry. In general, hiring managers will be looking for particular technical skills that align with the duties you’ll be performing. You can help your experience stand out by including a skillbank that lists the relevant software you have familiarity with. Additionally, if you have been promoted internally to an office manager position before, you should reference your previous positions to show your aptitude for the work.
Office managers are expected to have a toolkit of technical skills. Aside from integrating your skills throughout your resume (in the form of bullet-pointed accomplishments that work in the tools you are familiar with), you should include a skillbank at either the bottom or the side of your resume to emphasize the technical skills or particular software that you have expertise with.
Being able to demonstrate your ability to work hard and excel as an office manager is the whole point of your resume; as such, including any relevant internal promotions you’ve earned will help you stand out to hiring managers. It not only helps assert that you know what the position requires, it also serves to indicate that you are a dedicated worker who will go above and beyond for their company.
As the name indicates, dental office managers are specifically experienced with working in a dental office setting. Like medical office managers, they’ll be accustomed to handling patient information and administering paperwork. You should demonstrate your experience with the work by emphasizing appropriate office manager skills and starting each bullet point with a strong action verb.
Hiring managers will be looking for experience with overseeing dental offices, insurance verification processes, and working with patient charts. Each one of your accomplishments as an office manager should be directly related to the position. If you have worked in other industries or fields, try to tie in your past work with the duties of an office manager whenever possible.
By starting each one of your accomplishments with a powerful action verb, you’ll be relating that you have familiarity with the office manager position. Your bullet points should lead with words like “organized”, “conducted”, “managed”, or “calculated” (see below for more examples) to hit home that you’re right for the position.
Medical office managers will have experience working with patient records, patient scheduling, office finances, and insurance verification, along with a host of other specialized tasks. Accuracy and attention to detail are more important than ever in this role, and so it helps to provide the scope and scale of your background in the medical industry with quantifiable data points and specific skills.
To indicate the impact you were able to make at your previous employers, or to relate how many patients or staff you’ve worked with, you’ll want to include numerical values in every accomplishment. It makes a much bigger impression to say that you handled payroll for 500 staff members than to state that your responsibilities included timely payroll management.
While you may have experience in other fields, you should keep the hiring manager focused on your medical office manager background. You can do this by ensuring that your accomplishments consistently reference working with patients and physicians. If you have worked in other fields, aim to reference the transferable skills (such as team management) whenever possible.
Front office managers are focused on staff management, typically in hotel settings or similar scenarios where the daily operations of a business will come down to your expertise. You can make a potent impression by starting your resume with a short summary or introduction. Adding in volunteer work or relevant certifications will further lend to your credibility as being involved in the front office management role.
As a front office manager, you’ll often be among the first points of contact for clients or customers. First impressions - whether for the business or for yourself - are important, and so it helps to start your resume with a short, succinct summary that conveys your experience, your skills, and, when possible, numerical values to back it up.
If you are an active volunteer, then you’ll want to include the pro bono work that you’ve done (along with how many hours you contribute on a regular basis). This helps hiring managers see that you have a commitment to your community’s success. Additionally, any recent certifications that are relevant for office manager work should be listed in a sidebar to give a quick impression of your accredited skills.
An office administrator ensures that an office runs smoothly. In this position, you will make sure all necessary supplies are available, maintain office files, coordinate meetings, support staff with events, organize payroll, etc. It is a very multipronged position so having a wide set of skills would be useful. Recruiters care most about your previous experience in a similar position and the tools and skills you have so make sure you spend extra time on these sections. Take a look at this successful resume sample.
Certifications show recruiters that you are passionate about your profession and are willing to go the extra mile to improve your skill set. That drive and effort are very impressive to recruiters so if you have any administration-related certifications like this applicant has, make sure you include them in your resume.
Recruiters will be looking closely to see if you have experience using the tools they use. You having experience in the tools they have means your transition into the job will be smoother. Research and find out what tools they use so you can make sure you have listed them. If you aren’t familiar with a specific tool, do a crash course on it before adding it to your resume.
An office administrator provides support with clerical duties in an organization. They arrange appointments and meetings, create presentations, keep track of office supplies, and place orders when needed. Office administrators ensure that colleagues follow compliance policies and assign each team member administrative tasks. As an office administrator, you must have problem-solving skills. A good way to highlight this in your resume is by mentioning previous challenges and how you addressed them.
Even though it seems to be focused on clerical tasks, office administrators have a leadership role. They must oversee their colleagues' performance and ensure they follow corporate compliance, meet deadlines, and work within a budget. That’s why it is relevant to highlight your office management skills in your resume.
In this role, you will be interacting with numerous employees, and that can be overwhelming sometimes. However, a good office administrator knows how to be patient and has excellent interpersonal skills. In your resume, you can mention your experience working with multiple teams. This will help your future employer know that you are capable of team work.
In this position, you will manage the day-to-day tasks associated with keeping an office running smoothly. Some tasks you can expect include maintaining databases, coordinating office supply delivery and storage, scheduling meetings, processing invoices, etc. Recruiters will expect to see a bachelor’s degree in business, management, or a related field as well as years of experience in the position. Take a look at this recruiter-approved resume sample.
This job requires you to complete a wide range of tasks so you should develop a skills section that is equally diverse. This applicant has included a range of capabilities including budgeting, marketing, and event planning.
Metrics make a resume more digestible and impressive. It is favorable for a recruiter to know exactly how much you saved your company because of your efficiencies, or by what percentage you made certain tasks more efficient.
An assistant office manager offers administrative support to the executives and the rest of the office staff. Your tasks may include scheduling meetings and travel, maintaining supplies, assisting with events or projects, handling correspondences, etc. You need to be able to multitask and have a varied skill set. You also need to be personable and have strong interpersonal and communication skills. Take a look at this successful resume sample.
Action verbs are a great way to shape your experience section. Because this position calls for you to do varying tasks, use action verbs that indicate varying tasks and functions. Some action verbs the applicant uses for this purpose include ‘maintained’, ‘developed’, ‘tracked’, and ‘prepared’.
Grab recruiters’ attention from the very beginning of your resume. Because they may not have time to scrutinize the hundreds of resumes they get, it’s advantageous to include impressive achievements and metrics in the introduction section as this applicant has done.
As the name suggests, this is an office manager who works in a construction company. You will complete the same administrative tasks any other office manager would complete, such as filing, handling correspondence, scheduling meetings, etc. However, you may also have construction-specific tasks to complete such as managing project budgets and schedules, hiring and communicating with foremen and other construction stakeholders, evaluating subcontractor bids, etc. Your resume needs to show a background in and understanding of the construction industry and also needs to show your experience doing administrative tasks. Here is an example of a successful resume sample.
Your skills list should not read like a general office manager’s skill list. There are certain skills pertinent to construction that you should include. Relevant skills that this applicant has included are renovation, construction safety, and construction.
Recruiters often use ATS resume filters to narrow down the applicant and create a list of the most suitable candidates. Forgetting to simply add the word ‘construction’ to your resume title might cause you to be filtered out.
Office managers wield a combination of personnel management and technical skills to perform their roles, and hiring managers will be looking for specific responsibilities in your resume. On the left, we’ve compiled the most commonly utilized skills for office managers to give you a pool to draw from as you build your resume.
As office managers often have a significant amount of data to manage, or a roster of staff, you’ll want to display your proficiency at these tasks with each accomplishment you list. Integrating the skills on the left with technical tools (such as Adobe Acrobat Pro or Quickbooks) will serve as a double whammy in indicating your experience in the position.
Other than working your skills into the body of your resume, don’t forget to include a skill bank at the top or bottom of the page. You may wish to start with a short (1-2 sentence) summary that includes your hardest hitting statistics (such as how long you’ve been in the field or how many personnel you’ve managed).
This word cloud highlights the important keywords that appear on Office Manager job descriptions and resumes. The bigger the word, the more frequently it appears on job postings, and the more 'important' it is.
Office managers are all about organization, and, fortunately, there’s an easy way to organize your accomplishments while working in strong action verbs that relay your capabilities. Each of your 1-2 sentence bullet points should start with an appropriate action verb, and incorporate others where necessary to round out your background. This helps impart to hiring managers that you are able to handle the responsibilities of the position and that you respect time management.
While it’s okay to duplicate these action verbs a few times, avoid using the same ones too often as it will blur your experience together.
For a full list of effective resume action verbs, visit Resume Action Verbs.
If you're a senior-level employee, or you're changing careers to become an Office Manager, it's useful to add a paragraph at the top of your resume highlighting your most impressive accomplishments. This is called a resume summary.
Here's an example of a summary that can be used on an Office Manager resume.
A resume summary is a totally optional section, and in most cases, it's better to leave it out of your resume than include it. For example, if you're a student or mid-level hire, you should not include a summary, and instead use the space to add to your work experience.
To learn how to write an effective resume summary for your Office Manager resume, or figure out if you need one, please read Resume Summary Examples for Job Seekers: When To Include One.
You should use bullet points to describe your achievements in your Office Manager resume. Here are sample bullet points to help you get started:
Executed four branch openings, including location selection, P&L development, and task coordination for 5 functional areas, resulting in $9MM of incremental revenue over 2 years
Redesigned and implemented over 15 business processes for an estimated 50% efficiency gain in operations and potential net savings of $3MM for a pharmaceutical company
Refined outsourcing strategy, resulting in increased offshore headcount from 12 to 95 employees and saved $1.2MM
Conceptualized, redesigned, and presented enhancements to the data warehouse and stored SQL procedures, leading to 100x increased query performance (double digit minutes to milliseconds)
Determined sales effectiveness strategy for a ERP software supplier to increase sales by $10M over three years
For more sample bullet points and details on how to write effective bullet points, see our articles on resume bullet points, how to quantify your resume and resume accomplishments.
