Teacher Resume Example

Writing a teacher resume that will impress the head of school isn’t always easy. Fortunately, there are a few easy steps you can take to improve your job application and start landing interviews.

Here are the top tips for writing a strong teacher resume:

Back-Up Your Professional Experience With Numbers

One of the most effective ways to communicate your qualifications as an educator is to explain your achievements to employers using hard numbers. For example, use numbers throughout your resume experience section to highlight the skills, abilities, and knowledge that you’ve accumulated through your career.

Make sure that your bullet points are accomplishment-oriented and quantified.

For instance, in our English teacher sample resume, here’s an example of a quantified bullet point that demonstrates accomplishments.

Pay attention to the bold text:

• Ensured that all students comprehended the curriculum, and supported students who required extra guidance, resulting in writing and reading comprehension test scores increasing 16% over three years on average

The candidate’s ability to raise test scores demonstrates that they are a skilled teacher and a potentially valuable hire, especially given the current teaching climate in the US, which is increasingly test score-oriented.

What if you lack accomplishments?

Many teachers face difficult challenges based on their circumstances, including being underfunded, teaching in tough neighborhoods, and lacking support from administration. In other words, not everyone is capable of increasing test scores by 16% over three years on average, simply because reality won’t allow for it.

In that case, your resume can still be quantified by giving the hiring manager a concrete idea of the scope of your skills and abilities. For instance, you can quantify the number of students you work with per semester:

• Assess and look after 150+ students’ progress throughout the term and work closely with other staff to efficiently plan and coordinate work

Or you can quantify the size of the school you work in:

• …with curriculum objectives and assist students to prepare for examinations in a 2,500+ student school

Or you can quantify the number of people you trained, which indicates that you are knowledgeable, skilled, and trusted by management — excellent qualities to impress upon a hiring manager:

• Trained four new preschool teachers, emphasizing the importance of classroom control…

The important thing to remember is that your bullet points should not simply be a list of your duties and responsibilities. Instead, they should illustrate your impact and the results you’ve delivered for students and the school itself.

Include your Teaching Certifications

Most teachers should list all of their certifications, or at least when they anticipate receiving them. This can either be done in a separate certifications section, or added to your resume skills section.

Certifications differ greatly between different states. You will need to be aware of how they are listed in your state. In our English teacher sample, the candidate is from Florida, where a middle school English teacher certification is called “Certification in Middle Grades English.”

To find out your state’s teaching requirement, stop by Teach.com’s Where Can I Teach? map for all the details you need to start your career.

Action Verbs for Teachers

Another way to grab attention while highlighting your qualifications is to include strong action verbs throughout your resume.

For example, instead of saying you were “responsible for” improving the curriculum, say you “spearheaded” an overhaul of the curriculum. This indicates to employers that you’re a capable, effective educator.

To get you started, here’s a list of some helpful action verbs for teachers:

Like the list above? Find more at the longest action verb list in the universe.

How to Convey Entry-Level Teacher Resume Experience

If you are an entry-level teacher, then you’ve recently been through extensive training, including earning classroom experience through interactive field experience.

This experience should also be included in your professional experience section, but under a different subheading called “Interactive Field Experience”.

Create a subheading for each school where you earned field experience, and write your bullet points in the same way described in the above section — make sure they are targeted, quantified, specific, and impactful.

The final section of your resume is the skills section, which is detailed below.

Add Teacher Resume Skills

Teaching skills need to be kept up to date, because teaching methods often change in light of new research and shifts coming from boards of education across the US.

For instance, here are some of the top teacher skills to include on your resume (according to our custom data):

Additionally, showcase a balance of soft and hard skills throughout your resume, as well as on your teacher resume skills section.

Hard skills — abilities you’ve taken the time to learn and get certified for — are an essential part of a strong teaching application. Here are some hard teacher skills you might include on your resume:

• Curriculum planning
• Certificate in Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)
• SMART boards
• Cardiopulmonary resuscitation/automatic external defibrillator (CPR/AED)
• Blackboard

Soft skills — skills related to your personality and ability to work with others — are also critical skills needed to be a teacher. And thankfully for you and job seekers everywhere, these skills naturally develop over the course of your lifetime.

For example, your organizational skills improve when you move out of your parents’ home  and take responsibility for more areas of your life.

Here are some more soft skills for a teacher resume:

• Communication skills
• Interpersonal skills
• Leadership skills
• Time management skills
• People skills

To fully outline your teacher skills, resumes for teachers of IT, science, and technology-related classes can benefit from including a technical skills section in addition to their main skills section.

In this technical skills section, you should describe any special equipment and software you can use, such as:

• Bunsen burners
• Soldering
• JavaScript
• Circuit boards
• Adobe Photoshop

All teachers will probably need to list some of the following classroom management software skills on their resumes:

• Pearson ECollege
• Moodle 
• Sakai
• Lore
• MyEdu
• Instructure Canvas

And there are some software-specific teacher skills you’ll need to use both inside and outside of the classroom:

• Microsoft Office
• GIMP
• Windows Movie Maker
• iMovie

If you’re doing some research, the following teaching skills will come in handy:

• Web browsing and online search abilities
• JSTOR
• Google Scholar

Other Potential Sections for Your Teacher Resume

Other information you could include on your resume: study abroad, relevant coursework, or academic awards (GPA, Dean’s List), and accomplishments

One last point: don’t get down about writing your teacher resume. You didn’t decide to become a teacher because you wanted to become rich, you did it because you have passion for education. As Professor of Economics Larry Smith of Waterloo University explains, “Never forget to hold onto that passion!”