As a corporate Vice President, your resume must drive home your ability to see the big picture, and make timely decisions and interventions to boost a company’s impact. The VP role requires a broad skill base, yet a depth of experience in leading across large, complex teams.
Your VP resume must show how powerfully you’ve served as a role model, a capable stand-in leader, a board advisor, and a steadfast ballast in times of change, uncertainty or crisis.
Read on for nuanced guidance and real examples of how to bring refinement to your VP resume.
Expert Tip. You’ll get better results if you enlist the help of a professional executive resume writer.
Example Of How Leading VPs Structure A Resume.
You know what it takes to oversee departmental success and company-wide operations, but if you have’t changed roles recently you might be unclear about what a top-tier Vice President resume looks like.
Take this well-crafted VP resume as an example to emulate:
[Insert graphic here of example resume]
The VP Resume: Sections To Include.
Hiring managers looking for VP-level leaders would expect your resume to cover:
- A clear header with your name, key contacts and career-relevant keywords.
- A summary of your experience, performance and motivational mentality.
- Your employment history, challenges overcome, and goals achieved.
- Your skills in directing, evaluating, providing insights and leading change.
- Your education, awards and commitment to professional growth.
How To Write A Vice President Resume.
Like any senior executive position, the results you’ve enabled matter.
Hard data, budget savings and revenue figures should be prevalent within your VP resume.
But the Vice President role can be a different beast—because you’re coordinating a lot more moving parts to achieve outcomes, including a corporate governance responsibility.
The way you personally contribute is often based on setting a strategy or policy, high-level guidance, problem-solving, and relationship-building.
Recruiters need to be able understand the how, not just what happened as a result.
How did you:
- Articulate the company’s mission and the board’s vision in a way that cut through?
- Effectively monitor, evaluate and uplift company performance or culture?
- Navigate stakeholder perspectives to provide timely advice on major decisions?
Take a moment to consider the stories and examples you can draw on to answer these kinds of questions as you describe your skills and accomplishments in your Vice President resume.
The best way to frame your experience in your VP resume will also depend on the size and industry of the organisation, and the remit of the position.
Is the Vice President role second-in-command after the President, or one of several VPs reporting to a CEO expected to possess expertise in a particular functional area, sector or geographic region?
Then, pull together each section of your resume by following this six step process.
1. Keep The Format And Design Classy.
Don’t buck convention unless you’ve got a good reason. That means using the reverse chronological format for your Vice President resume, where roles are listed from most to least recent.
What’s a good reason for a different structure?
If you haven’t held a VP role before and your leadership journey is less traditional, you could consider a ‘functional’ format, where the skills and achievements that have defined your career take priority over your job history.
Once you’ve decided on the content’s order, follow these formatting and design tips:
- Use a recent template with large headings, clear sections and effective use of white space.
- Aim for legibility over style. That rules out columns, boxes, tables, photos and graphics.
- Choose a clean typeface such as Arial, Calibri or Helvetica.
- Highlight and break up text with discreet use of colour, bullet points, bolding, and lines.
Important! PDF is the go-to file type to save your resume as. It keeps your formatting in alignment and it’s more compatible with any computing system than Word.
[Insert example of header with clean text, colour, bold, lines]
2. Set The Scene In Your Resume Header.
The header section is primarily for informational purposes.
The biggest text should be your name. Your key contact details should be neatly positioned at the top of the page as well, to make things easy for recruiters.
But there’s also scope to convey more in your title. For instance, instead of simply ‘Vice President’, you might write ‘Experienced Finance Sector Vice President’.
Or you could list keywords after your title, like this: Vice President | Risk Management | Digital Transformation.
3. Impress With Your Resume Summary.
In 1-2 paragraphs, convincingly describe your core attributes independent of any role—the high-level know-how and personal traits that have guaranteed your rise to the VP level.
Whether you call it a ‘Summary’, ‘Objective Statement’ or—our favourite—‘Professional Profile’, ensure you don’t waste a word.
(Related: How To Write A HR Executive Resume).
Make it concise and packed with specific details about the value you bring through your past experiences and your innate qualities.
For a Vice President resume it also make sense to highlight “what makes you a great leader of leaders?”
What is it about you that means you excel at inspiring other company directors, reporting to the board, and acting as a trusted go-between for both?
This example illustrates a great Vice President resume summary:
[Example graphic of a VP profile]
4. Use Your Work Experience To Prove Your Value.
Dig deep to demonstrate the actual impact of your leadership, strategic planning and operational savvy in past roles to make hiring panels sit up and take notice.
As you list each professional experience, highlight relevant and exceptional achievements, which should include a good mix of:
- Measurable results such as revenue growth, meeting financial targets, increases in customer experience scores, increase in employee satisfaction, productivity gains, cost-optimisation savings, margin improvements, industry awards, etc.
- Strategic approach to delivering results such as how you identified trends or risks, pivoted to new models or markets, drove innovation, improved processes, enhanced staff behaviour or wellbeing, broke down communication barriers, etc.
Important! Ditch the dry language in favour of dynamic verbs that convey the action you took when describing achievements. Use words like: boosted, transformed, delegated, influenced.
[Example graphic of a Vice President achievements]
Follow this familiar format to present each work experience:
- Your job title,
- The company name,
- The dates of your tenure.
- A brief overview of the company’s mission and stature.
List your most recent roles first and work backwards for at least 10-15 years. Gradually pare back the detail included, or even just list the job title, company and date for your earliest (and least relevant) jobs.
5. List Skills That Showcase Your Perceptiveness.
Use your VP resume skills section to show you’ve got the perfect balance of pragmatism, emotional intelligence and strategic insight to oversee and enhance the company’s future growth and day-to-day operations.
Common skills you’d see on a Vice President resume include:
- Public speaking
- Negotiation
- Adaptability
- Creativity
- Change management
- Operations management
- Sales forecasting
- Crisis Management
- Business development
- Agile methodologies
- HR performance analytics
Elaborate on each skill you list to explain how you competently apply the skill.
This example shows a persuasive list of VP resume skills:
[Example graphic of a CEO key assets]
6. Include A Professional Development Overview.
Evidence of professional growth rounds out a great VP resume, so don’t neglect to list your most relevant qualifications, certifications, mentoring or volunteering experiences, memberships and awards.
Include the following details:
- Title of qualification/award or position.
- Title of issuing organisation or membership body.
- Year or date range.
Create A Crisp Vice President Cover Letter.
The quality of your cover letter can catapult your resume to the top of a recruiter’s ‘to be read’ pile.
Offer a brief but rousing explanation of why you’d make the ideal VP for a particular company, and inject some personality into your writing.
Try to minimise repetition of your resume.
Also, see if there’s any gaps in your resume (due to lack of space) you can fill in the cover letter by mentioning different accomplishments or skills.
Important! Don’t make the recruiter think too hard. Double-check that the dates, titles and details mentioned in both your letter and resume aren’t conflicting.
Frequently Asked Questions About VP Resumes.
Make sure you understand these points about VP resumes before you start writing.
What’s The Right Length For A Vice President Resume?
Usually, senior executives vying for a Vice President role have more than 20 years of experience in management and leadership.
Covering a long career history typically requires a VP’s resume to be at least 2-4 pages long.
What Makes A Vice President Resume Distinctive?
Vice President job candidates all have individual traits and approaches they’re known for among their colleagues and peers.
But not everyone takes the time to identify and communicate their personal ‘brand’ through their resume and cover letter—and that does them a disservice.
Selling your uniqueness through the specific examples and language you use throughout your resume sets you apart as a ‘must meet’ individual, who deserves to progress to an interview.
Polish Your Resume To Become A Preferred VP Candidate.
Large companies will be wary of hiring a Vice President that’s prone to getting “lost in the weeds”, isn’t shrewd enough to spot high-level opportunities for improvement, or isn’t courageous enough to uphold a company’s vision and values.
Your resume must be tailored to reflect your superior ability to handle the responsibility with finesse, so you can ensure smooth operations, promote a positive work environment and keep your company competitive long-term.
If you need professional help to write your VP resume or cover letter, reach out to us at Arielle.
Irene
