Major Incident Manager: responsibilities, education, skills and career path

Leads the resolution of major incidents: war room, communication, escalation and executive reporting.

Entry

Senior

Coding

Low

Key skills

Major incident commandCrisis communicationCross-team escalationDecision-making under pressure

Common progression

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Career overview

The Major Incident Manager leads the resolution of P1/major incidents: war room coordination, cross-team escalation, executive and customer communication, decision-making under pressure and the post-major-incident review. They own the incident crisis command. The role leads to IT service manager, IT operations manager or cybersecurity manager.

Main responsibilities

Lead major incident resolution
Lead incident resolution and post-mortem analysis
Escalate complex cases to the relevant technical team
Align stakeholders and report progress
Respect SLA response and resolution targets
Keep technical documentation up to date
Write and improve operational runbooks
Monitor platform health, alerts and dashboards
Prioritise work and manage competing demands
Prepare and execute change requests in production
Produce operations reporting and KPIs
Mentor junior team members and review their work

Technical skills

Major incident command95%

Crisis communication90%

Cross-team escalation90%

Executive reporting85%

Decision-making under pressure90%

ITIL incident management85%

Stakeholder management85%

Post-incident review85%

Technologies

ServiceNowPagerDutyOpsgenieTeamsWebexConfluencePower BIExcelSlackM365ITILJira Service ManagementZoomPower AutomateOutlookMattermost

Education level

Education requirements vary depending on the company, country and experience. Professional experience, certifications and technical skills can sometimes compensate for formal education.

High School / Bac

Less common

Bac+2 (2-year degree)

Less common

Bac+3 (Bachelor)

Common entry point

Bac+5 (Master / Engineering)

Common entry point