Adding Time Management Skills to Your CV This Year

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 CV so that your future employer knows you’re great at them, here’s what you need to know.

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.

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.

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.