7 Tips to Craft the Perfect Teacher Resume

Table of Contents

1. Highlight your teaching experience and certifications in your resume objective.
2. Touch upon hard and soft skills throughout your resume.
3. Quantify your teaching accomplishments.
4. Download and modify a resume template.
5. Spend time to make your writing exceptionally clear.
6. Use job-specific keywords when possible.
7. Check out other teacher resume samples in your specialization.

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Perfecting your teaching resume can be a daunting and tedious process. With much information to show and a limited amount of space, being concise and straightforward is critical.

Unsure of how to start? Not to worry, we have you covered. Here are seven effective tips for crafting the perfect teacher resume to help your application stand out from other candidates vying for the same job.

1. Highlight your teaching experience and certifications in your resume objective.

A well-written resume objective quickly highlights your suitability for and interest in an open position. Usually two to four sentences long and placed at the top of your resume, a resume objective emphasizes your most important accomplishments while explaining how you’ll apply your professional skills to the school you’re applying to.

Here’s an example of a resume objective for a math teacher:

The example above works because it:

Highlights the candidate’s teaching experience
Lists their education, teaching license(s), and special certifications
Supports their abilities with a statistic
Communicates their dedication to student success and passion for education

Don’t forget, there are lots of different types of teaching positions. You need to craft a resume which matches the specific one that you are pursuing. For instance, you could be interested in teaching religious studies. If that’s the case you could reference something like your attendance and accomplishments at Master of Theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary or a similar place of study.

2. Touch upon hard and soft skills throughout your resume.

Touch upon a variety of hard and soft skills throughout your resume (in your experience section, skills section, and introduction) to show recruiters you’re well-prepared for any task required of a teacher.

Hard skills are abilities you’ve developed over time and are certified in, and are often required to do a particular job. For teachers, with online teaching becoming more prevalent in 2021, hard skills like software proficiency and the ability to use online teaching tools are crucial.

Examples of hard skills for teachers include:

Knowledge of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace
Certifications in field-specific subjects
Experience with learning management systems such as Schoology

On the other hand, soft skills highlight your personality and teaching style, giving employers insight into what you’re like as a teacher, and how you interact with students and colleagues.

Some soft skills valued by schools include the following:

Communication skills
Classroom management skills
Level of empathy and patience

Custom infographic from Resume Genius’s teacher resume example page.

3. Quantify your teaching accomplishments.

Recruiters are always looking for teachers with a proven success rate, and providing hard numbers is the best way to communicate the successes of your teaching career.

Here are a few ways to quantify your teaching accomplishments on your resume (these are examples from a teacher’s work experience section):

90%+ student pass rate on standardized exams
Increased student enrollment by 15% after improving course subjects and curriculum

Even if you lack teaching experience, there are other ways to quantify your skills and qualifications. The following alternatives are equally effective at illustrating your abilities.

Instructed 100+ students as an assistant in a high-school science program
Developed and taught course materials over 40+ hours a week for an online teaching position during the pandemic

Perfecting your teaching resume can be a daunting and tedious process. With much information to show and a limited amount of space, being concise and straightforward is critical. Unsure of how to start? Not to worry, we have you covered.Click To Tweet

4. Download and modify a resume template.

If you’re unsure of how to make a visually appealing resume, downloading a pre-existing resume template can save you both time and effort.

While the information you outline in your teacher resume is ultimately what’s going to get you the job, a legible, presentable, and organized application says a lot about the type of applicant you are. First impressions always matter, even if you haven’t met your potential employer face-to-face yet.

5. Spend time to make your writing exceptionally clear.

Unsplash image

Strong communication skills are essential for teachers, and a large part of communication includes writing.

Take the time to proofread your resume carefully, making sure your sentences are free of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Such errors could jeopardize your candidacy and make employers question your actual teaching abilities.

To further foolproof your teacher resume, ask a friend or colleague to read over it and give you feedback. An extra set of eyes is always helpful, and could ultimately save you time.

6. Use job-specific keywords when possible.

Teaching job descriptions include a range of keywords related to specific skills they would like prospective teachers to have. These keywords include industry-specific terms and acronyms, which are important since digital resumes are often organized by keyword search terms.

Customizing your resume to include the keywords listed in the job description, whether you include them as adjectives, verbs, or nouns, will make you seem tailor-made for the role. Adding the right keywords will even help your resume bypass applicant tracking systems (ATS) meant to filter out unqualified candidates, so make sure you include some.

Consider the following list of education-related resume keywords when writing your own resume:

Curriculum development
Teaching and learning
Classroom discipline
Peer-tutoring
ESL/ESOL students
Creative lesson planning

7. Check out other teacher resume samples in your specialization.

Checking out other teacher resume samples in your specialization is important because it gives you insight into how you can further strengthen your own resume. Once you better understand your own skill-set and qualifications in contrast to those of other teachers looking for work, you can ensure your resume is put together in a way that makes you best stand out.