Do you teach resume writing class?
If you do, you won’t need our help with crafting a job-winning application. Otherwise, you must be stuck trying to fit years of school, work, and self-education into a standard resume template. Before you go crazy, let us share our experience and insights tailored to your honorable occupation. We guarantee actionable tips, illustrative examples, and common mistakes to avoid.
Consider this teacher resume sample as you read our suggestions and take note of improvements you can make to your job application.
Teacher Resume Summary
If you are reworking your previous resume, you might not be familiar with this critical block. A decade or two ago employment objective was the right thing to put at the top of your resume, right under your name and contact information. It helped recruiters sort through incoming paperwork and file resumes for similar positions under the same category. If you plan on mailing your application, this might still be your best choice. However, if you apply online, through email or a dedicated website or form, teacher resume summary is the way to go.
Instead of stating the desired position, explain why you are the best person to fill it, and what skills, experience, and qualifications make you indispensable. Follow these guidelines to come up with a job-winning summary:
- Sum up the benefits you can bring to the school district in 2 or 3 short sentences. The HR manager should be able to read the summary at a glance.
- Write in the third person without using “I” and “my” too often. Sentence fragments are fine in resume summary even if it pains you to use them.
- Add one or two keywords to pass the applicant tracking system (ATS) checks. This will ensure your resume is not discarded outright.
Finally, you can write two versions of the resume: one with a summary and one without it. Send them out randomly and consider the response. This will be the best indicator of the efficiency of the resume objective.
Teacher Resume Outline
If you think of your resume as an essay, you can break it down into three crucial parts: education, work history, and certificates. You can shuffle them around to set up the most logical and attention-grabbing structure, but all three should be present. Otherwise, no respectable school will even consider your application.
Let’s go over each of the three and ensure they highlight your best side.
The education section should list your post-secondary degrees, including the name of your school, city, and state, graduation month and year. List your GPA if it is above 3.0. As you are applying for a teaching position, you can also include your minors and concentrations to emphasize your interests and knowledge across a variety of subjects. This block is only for your formal education, not your online courses or further studies, though we’ll move on them in just a moment.
Certificates block should include all mandatory certifications the state or city require teachers to hold. List all exams or tests you took, your scores and the highest possible grades, and the year of completion. After you specify all mandatory certifications, you can add other self-education ventures you have taken. These may include workshops, online courses, professional training, and more. Alternatively, you can list them under “Extra achievements” section along with your studies abroad, internships, and professional memberships.
Employment history or work experience is the largest and most important section. It should comprise relevant positions you held from the current one to the earliest in your career. Feel free to omit irrelevant entries that do not demonstrate your teaching skills. Instead of cramming all past jobs onto a single page, focus on the most significant experiences, and illustrate your achievements, not duties. Do not worry about the gaps in your employment history. You will have an opportunity to explain them during the interview.
Teacher Achievements for Resume
One of the common mistakes most job seekers make is explaining their duties and daily routines under each employment history entry. For teachers, the list usually looks like this:
- Helped teachers create lesson plans
- Assisted students during the lab assignments
- Supervised tests and quizzes to ensure the students could not cheat
- Administered detentions to mitigate disruptive classroom behavior
While correctly formatted and logical, this list does nothing to distinguish you from other teachers. If you think about it, you’ll see that any of your colleagues could use this list in their resume. Uniformity is the last thing you need during a job hunt. Try formulating your achievements instead.
The basic formula is
Action Verb + Specifics = Results
If you take the same bullet points and apply this formula to them, you will get a list of unique achievements:
- Customized lesson plans for students with unique needs to increase classroom engagement.
- Designed interactive lab presentations to promote student safety and ensure desired experiment outcomes.
- Implemented educational technology to hold 5-minute tests during each class to evaluate conceptual learning.
- Established a positive reinforcement system to mitigate disruptive classroom behavior and decrease the number of detentions by 50%.
Besides providing quantifiable results and painting a picture of your teacher achievements for resume, these bullet points can also include mentions of your hard and soft skills. Interspersed within the work history section, they will support the list you provide and make your application well-rounded and compelling.
The Right Teacher Resume Skills to Highlight
A good resume for teachers includes both soft and hard skills to demonstrate that you can find the right tone with the students and your colleagues, possess critical thinking skills necessary for planning lessons and conducting lab exercises. Despite the recent shift towards the focus on interpersonal skills, hard professional competences are equally important. These may include:
- Classroom management
- Bookkeeping or accounting
- Foreign language fluency
- Education software proficiency
- Interdisciplinary teaching
You can mix and match hard and soft skills in a separate block. You can also list hard features here and sprinkle the interpersonal competencies within your work history section. However, you should avoid repeating yourself, even if you want to emphasize the point.
Mistakes to Avoid in Your Teacher Resume
If you have crafted a glowing experienced teacher resume, but still haven’t gotten any response, there must be something wrong. Many job hunters commit mistakes and lose great employment opportunities without even realizing it. To prevent any unconscious missteps, DO NOT:
- Overuse the buzz words. Multicultural instruction and peer teaching are an excellent addition to your application, but you should not stuff your resume full of keywords to impress the recruiter. In the best-case scenario, they will assume you overstate your expertise, and in the worst-case scenario, they will consider you a liar and blacklist your resume. Use buzz words sparingly to emphasize your ability to follow teaching trends and weave them into your daily routines.
- Ignore format in favor of content. Your writing should be impeccable to get an interview invitation, but the way your resume looks is equally important. If you can’t list all pertinent information on one page, delete something. Do not try to squeeze everything onto a single sheet by reducing the margin width or choosing a smaller text size. Hiring managers are human, and you should respect their time and work by making your resume easy on the eyes.
- Wait for a callback to provide extra paperwork. As a teacher, you need more evidence and papers to support your job application. It is a good idea to attach copies of your certificates, recommendation letters, sample lesson plans, and a digital portfolio. The position description might also include writing prompts for you to expand on in a cover letter. The more relevant papers you provide to support your resume, the easier it will be for hiring managers to decide you are the right person for the job.
Suggested Reading:
- Internship Resume Advice From Hiring Managers
- Job Winning Skills For Resume