Production managers spend the majority of their time ensuring everything is running smoothly and efficiently. They come up with different processes, policies, and procedures in order to increase production and improve efficiency.
Aside from being a great leader, production managers are crazy-good at planning. Since they have to hit deadlines, they have everything planned down to the second. That's why efficiency is the name of their game. They want to ensure goals and deadlines are not only met, but also completed.
While they're consistently focused on meeting deadlines, production managers care a great deal about safety. A safe work environment equals a safe and happy team. That's why production managers place a huge emphasis on complying with safety policies and regulations. A safety rule a day keeps the work incidents at bay.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a production manager. For example, did you know that they make an average of $34.74 an hour? That's $72,269 a year!
There are certain skills that many production managers have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed interpersonal skills, leadership skills and problem-solving skills.
When it comes to the most important skills required to be a production manager, we found that a lot of resumes listed 7.6% of production managers included continuous improvement, while 6.6% of resumes included customer service, and 5.9% of resumes included quality standards. Hard skills like these are helpful to have when it comes to performing essential job responsibilities.
When it comes to searching for a job, many search for a key term or phrase. Instead, it might be more helpful to search by industry, as you might be missing jobs that you never thought about in industries that you didn't even think offered positions related to the production manager job title. But what industry to start with? Most production managers actually find jobs in the manufacturing and retail industries.
If you're interested in becoming a production manager, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 47.8% of production managers have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 12.1% of production managers have master's degrees. Even though most production managers have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a production manager. When we researched the most common majors for a production manager, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or associate degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on production manager resumes include high school diploma degrees or master's degree degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a production manager. In fact, many production manager jobs require experience in a role such as production supervisor. Meanwhile, many production managers also have previous career experience in roles such as operations manager or manager.