How to Become a Business Operations Manager

Achieving a management role in any field can represent a huge step forward in your career. But if you’re thinking about pursuing a management career in business, particularly as a business operations manager, you might be curious about the best way to go about achieving your goals.

What is a business operations manager exactly? What steps can I take to prepare to pursue a management role in business?

Let’s take some time to understand what a business operations manager is and then move on to how to become a business operations manager in the following sections:

• What is a Business Operations Manager?
• Business Operations Manager Education Requirements
• Is the Business Operations Manager Profession Growing?
• Useful Skills for Business Operations Managers

What is a Business Operations Manager?

Business operations managers oversee a company’s productivity and output. Their key functions include setting goals, creating budgets, improving processes and encouraging greater efficiency.

Business operations managers maintain a high level of oversight across an entire organization. With this perspective, they can more effectively see and evaluate the business as a whole.  Managers in this role have a responsibility to find ways to eliminate inefficiencies throughout the company and introduce new processes that result in more positive outcomes. To do this, they typically manage a business operations team that helps them carry out their goals within each specific department.

Business Operations Manager Education Requirements 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), operations managers typically need a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in business or field related to their work. Depending on the company you work for, one type of degree might be preferred over the other for a management position, and your years of experience may also be a factor.

Earning a degree in business or business management, like DeVry’s Bachelor’s Degree in Management or Bachelor’s Degree with a Specialization in Small Business Management and Entrepreneurship can be a great start, and help you develop relevant people management, planning skills and understand how to allocate human and financial resources for the best outcomes in companies of all sizes.

Is the Business Operations Manager Profession Growing?

According to the BLS, growth for top executives, which includes business operations managers, is expected to grow by about 8% on a national level between 2020 and 2030¹. Keep in mind that these projected growth rates are based on national data, and the growth rate may be higher or lower depending on where you live. The BLS also anticipates that 209,500 jobs will open in this field within the same timeframe. 

Useful Skills for Business Operations Managers

Business operations managers need to have a wide range of skills in order to effectively identify and resolve inefficiencies within a company. Many of the skills that are used in a business operations manager’s day-to-day tasks can be learned during a bachelor’s degree.

Here are a few of the skills that you might find useful during a career in business operations management that you can learn at DeVry:

• Administration and management: Understanding how to delegate tasks, manage projects and resources, and set achievable goals for departments is a key function of a business operations manager.
• Critical thinking: In this career, it’s helpful to know how to think outside of the box and evaluate a plan’s strengths and weaknesses to come up with innovative solutions to challenging business problems.
• Mathematical reasoning: Managers regularly deal with budgets and numbers, so understanding how to use math formulas to decide project outcomes is critical.
• Judgment and decision making: Knowing how to review and compare two different plans and work out the outcomes is an important skill as a business operations manager.