When it comes to monitoring procedures, protocols, and safety, you’re always on top of things as a lab manager! You also probably handle tasks like employee scheduling or mentorship while closely monitoring crucial inventory items.
But how do you show the true impact of the many tasks you perform each day on your resume? Which resume template will best give an accurate snapshot of your value to recruiters?
We’ve created our lab manager resume examples to get you started! And don’t forget to consider the time-tested advice we’ve assembled after years of helping professionals like you.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Experiences
So, what job skills do you bring to the lab table? Recruiters want to know what sets you apart as a lab manager and what makes you an extra-good fit for the job.
Keep things as technical as possible, naming programs you use and referencing only the most relevant soft skills.
Hone each skill to align closely with your lab manager role so that you don’t waste recruiters’ time with generic terms like “communication” or “dedication.”
9 best lab manager skills
- LabWare
- MATLAB
- Python
- Minitab
- BLAST
- ChemDraw
- GraphPad Prism
- MS Excel
- Benchling
Sample lab manager work experience bullet points
Now that you’ve shared your specialized abilities as a lab manager, it’s time to give recruiters some success stories! An effective resume features strong experience points demonstrating how you’ve positively impacted your field.
Like your skills list, recruiters want to see highly specific experience points that align with the job description. Write a couple of extra bullet points that you can switch out to demonstrate your alignment with the lab manager role you crave.
By tailoring your experiences to the job description, you can make qualifications from older or non-related roles more relevant. What skills did you apply during your experiences to create success? How did you do it, and why?
Finally, what were the quantifiable results of your hard work? Look for impressive metrics that highlight your achievements as a lab manager, such as a reduction in manual work hours or percentages that measure employee efficiency or satisfaction.
Check out these samples:
- Improved experimental accuracy by 23% through JMP’s meticulous data analysis and rigorous quality control
- Boosted sample processing capacity by 53% by optimizing workstations and introducing automation using Benchling
- Led training programs that improved staff proficiency and technical skills, resulting in an average elimination of 11 weekly work hours
- Enhanced team productivity by 18% by fostering a collaborative work environment and implementing efficient communication strategies
- Implemented LabKey protocols that resulted in a 37% increase in research efficiency
Top 5 Tips for Your Lab Manager Resume
- Show off your adaptability
- One of the more significant facets of your managerial role is the ability to adapt to unexpected changes, quickly offering strategic solutions that benefit your whole team. Include a variety of contexts throughout your experience section to exemplify your expertise here.
- Streamline your bullet points
- Keep it brief when including context to add some luster to your main point and corresponding numerical data! Limit yourself to just a couple of lines for each point. Recruiters reading your lab manager resume will be impressed by how quickly you can slam out your achievements.
- Demonstrate growth throughout your career
- Whether adding previous jobs in reverse-chronological order or doing the same with the experience points in each section, use complexity to your advantage! As each experience becomes more recent, use it to bring increasingly impressive metrics and context that bolster your qualifications for a lab manager role.
- Showcase collaboration and leadership
- Another key aspect of operational efficiency, team morale, and increased success within the lab ecosystem is collaboration. (This is one of those soft skills that doubles as an awesome contextual element!) Think specifically of accomplishments that involved informing and rallying others toward a common objective that ended with a quantifiable bang!
- Don’t use just any number as a metric
- Make sure you’re using solid metrics that apply to the final impact of your work. For example, if your new training program increased team confidence and led employees to better efficiency rates, state the efficiency rate instead of how many teammates attended your program.
Alongside leveraging reverse-chronological order in your favor, focus on experience examples that showcase your leadership role in a team setting. Look through your professional history for the times you positively impacted your team and the entire company!
The job description gives a lot of answers away! If you’ve exhausted the requirements for inspiration, turn to the company or institution’s website for values, vision, or mission statements to align yourself with. Pick experience points from your past that closely match that specific job.
If it’s simply too hard to part with certain experience points or success stories, put some aside in another document. They’ll make an excellent foundation for a cover letter to complement your lab manager resume! When it comes down to it, you should strive to keep to a one-page resume, no matter what.
