Learn how to create a high-quality teacher resume by studying a complete guide that offers vital information, helpful examples, and expert tips.
As a teacher, you’re used to evaluating and grading your students. This time around, the roles have shifted. Your homework is to create the perfect teacher resume, and the recruiter is going to assess you based on it.
And if you don’t have a clue on how to approach this task, fear not—we’re going to help you learn.
By the time you’re finished with this guide, you’ll know how to create a job-winning resume that will ace any evaluation and earn you nothing but top grades from hiring managers.
Without further ado, let’s dive in!
Before you start adding valuable information to your resume, you need to decide which format you’re going to use. The way you organize and present information is just as important as the information itself.
The most common and generally best teacher resume format is chronological. Recruiters prefer it because it shows them your most recent and relevant jobs first. If you have a comprehensive work history, you can list it in reverse-chronological order to show them how your career has progressed.
Two more formats are widely popular, and these are functional and combination resume formats.
The functional format works great if you’re new to the industry or don’t have work experience to showcase since it focuses on your skills rather than your professional endeavors.
The combination (or hybrid) resume format, as the name suggests, combines reverse-chronological and functional formats. It also emphasizes your skills, but it’s best used by experienced teachers who can back up every skill with impressive workplace achievements.
After settling on the best teacher’s resume format for you, you’ll need a layout as well. It will make your document easy to scan, read, and remember. Here’s how to create the best layout possible:
To ensure that you’ve given recruiters all the important information that they are looking for, you want to have the following mandatory sections in your resume:
If you’ve added all of the mandatory sections and there’s room left on your teacher resume, you can consider some of the optional sections. They can add more personality to your document and make you stand out from the competition. These sections may include:
Hopefully, this whole resume-building endeavor seems less complicated already. But if you want an even simpler approach that will ensure you end up with the highest-quality resume, use our resume builder. It features teacher resume templates with suggested sections, so you can just pick one and fill it with your information.
To get a better idea of what your document should look like, let’s examine the teacher's resume template.
Name and Surname
Phone number: 000-000-0000 | Email: namesurname@gmail.com | Location: City, State
[Adjective] [your job title] with [years of experience, if applicable] in [your area of expertise, if applicable] looking for a [position] job at [company name]. Eager to apply [relevant skills] gained through [work/volunteer/other experience] to help [company name] [mention what you can do for the company].
Most Recent/Current Job Title Company City, State [Start date] — [End date]
Previous Job Title Company City, State [Start date] — [End date]
Oldest Job Title Company City, State [Start date] — [End date]
[Degree] in [Major] [University/college name] [Start date] - [Graduation date]
Soft Skills
Hard Skills
Contact information is a standard resume section, and its role is purely functional. It allows recruiters to contact you once your resume grabs their attention. As a result, even though it’s a straightforward part of your teacher's resume, it’s imperative you get it right.
The contact information section should contain the following information about you:
That’s the essential part, but you can always add a bit more if needed. For example, if you’re applying for a job abroad, you can mention your location. You can also add relevant social media accounts—for example, your LinkedIn profile, as this social network is rather popular in the professional environment.
Let’s take a look at the example:
Florence Chiesa
Now, let’s compare that to a bad example so that you can see which mistakes you should avoid:
Florence Chiesa
English Languge Sage
Instead of using a professional title, this candidate tried to be witty, which often draws the wrong kind of attention. Not only that, but they made a crucial mistake and misspelled a word. Finally, their email address is not very professional, and they listed a social media page that has nothing to do with being a teacher.
A resume summary or objective is an opening paragraph that serves to hook the person who reviews your job application.
A teacher's resume objective is typically used by candidates who don’t have much relevant professional experience and want to emphasize their skills and career goals.
On the other hand, a teacher’s resume summary is usually written by professionals who want to grab the recruiter’s attention by highlighting some of their most prominent workplace achievements.
Let’s take a look at a good high school teacher resume objective:
"Responsible English teacher with a track record of developing meaningful relationships with students in order to help them reach their full potential. Looking to apply this approach at City High Middle School and help boost students’ passing rates.”
The applicant leveraged their modest experience to back up some of their skills with relevant results. They also displayed a strong desire to work for that school in particular, showing a clear career objective.
Compare that to the following bad example:
“High school teacher with a BA in English looking for a position at City High Middle School.”
Apart from wanting a job, this candidate gave no useful information about themselves. The recruiters see no skills or goals in this writer’s resume objective.
If you have no professional experience, you can focus on your education and some of the soft skills, as well as experience obtained during internships, volunteer work, and similar activities. This candidate made a captivating resume objective despite having no work history:
“A resourceful teaching professional with a BA in Mathematics. Possesses guiding and counseling skills. Ability to be a team player and resolve conflicts quickly. Looking to contribute my math knowledge and tutoring skills to a school that offers an opportunity for career progression.”
Compare that to the following bad example:
“Competent Math professional looking to improve and refine my teaching skills and progress my career at your school.”
Apart from displaying a desire to advance their career, this candidate didn’t give any information of substance to the recruiters. As a result, potential employers can’t evaluate their skills and competence.
Experienced professionals want to leverage their work-related achievements since they generally carry more weight than skills and objectives. In that case, they’ll write a teacher’s resume summary like this one:
“Resourceful ESL teacher with 7+ years of experience teaching high school and middle school students. Competent in devising effective instructional programs and targeting individual learning gaps. Helped prepare at-risk students and improved their final test results by 37% at Townsend Harris High School. Looking to bring my skills and expertise to Haverford School.”
This candidate was brief but precise. They showcased palpable results, which gave recruiters direct insight into their competence.
The next example features nothing but vague promises of the ESL teacher’s skills and achievements, which makes it a rather bad one:
“ESL teacher with many years of professional experience developing creative instructions to help students reach their full potential. Skilled at mitigating individual learning gaps.”
Work experience is usually the most important section of a teacher’s resume. It directly shows your abilities as a teacher and your workplace proficiency, which is why recruiters pay the most attention to this part. As a result, it should be the focal point of your resume.
For starters, you want to list your previous jobs in the aforementioned reverse-chronological order. Include your most recent employment first, and add the following information:
You want to keep the entire list of previous jobs relevant to the position you’re applying for. There’s no need to include a bartending gig you had in the past since you’re applying for a teaching position.
Also, a good work experience section is more than just a list of facts. The key is to get the bullet point list right. Through it, you want to emphasize everything that makes you a competent professional.
Highlight your achievements and KPIs. To make them even more prominent, use numbers and statistics since they’ll quantify those accomplishments. For example, instead of merely stating that you “improved test scores," say that you “improved test scores by 30% compared to last year.”
Another powerful way to stand out among other candidates is to use action verbs and power words. Use impressive synonyms instead of overused terms to show creativity and make your teacher's resume stand out. For example, the next time you want to say "organized,” try “coordinated” instead.
Now let’s put all that advice into practice and check out some examples of teacher resume work experience sections.
Let’s start with the example of a high school teacher’s work experience. Here, the candidate used all the tips that we talked about. After listing the mandatory information, they made an impactful bullet point list that features both action verbs and power words, as well as numbers and percentages. Take a look at the example:
Work Experience
High School English Teacher
Haverford School Havertown, PA
What happens if you don’t have professional teaching experience? You can still have a rich and compelling section on your resume. To do this, you can leverage other experiences, such as volunteering, internships, substitute jobs, and so on.
Check out the example:
Work Experience
Substitute Teacher
Central Magnet School Murfreesboro, TN
Dec 2020–Feb 2021
Online teaching is all about being creative, flexible, and keeping up with the latest trends in technology. You can show all of this along with your more "traditional" skills and accomplishments as a teacher. It’s a surefire way to get a head start on the competition.
Take a look at the example:
Work Experience
Online English Teacher
Native Camp Tokyo, Japan
April 2019–October 2021
Your education gives you credibility as a teacher. While it’s not as important as your work experience, it’s great at painting a complete picture of you as a teaching professional.
In most cases, this section comes after your work experience. At the very least, it should have your degree, the name and location of the institution that gave it to you, and years of attendance.
Just like with the work experience section, you can add bullet points to this part to highlight some of your most prominent accomplishments. Here’s how a seasoned teacher with a master’s degree would write their education section:
Master of Arts in English
Stanford University Stanford, CA
On the other hand, even if you’re new to the industry (and maybe even still a student), you should include your highest academic degree in your resume. If you expect to graduate soon, mark it so, or simply omit the graduation date and write “current” instead. Take a look at the following example:
Bachelor of Arts in English
Stanford University Stanford, CA
Notice how both candidates only mention their latest degrees since everything before that is considered obsolete. You should only list your high school diploma if it’s your latest one. Even if you dropped out of college, you can still state how many credits you earned toward your highest degree.
Hard skills are specialized and usually obtained through formal education. On the other hand, soft skills allow you to be more effective and organized, be better at interpersonal relationships, communicate with your peers and students fluently, and so on.
Recruiters want to see both of these on your resume. To get the most out of your skills, you should include some of them in your resume summary or objective, as well as your work experience section.
However, you'll still need a dedicated section for teacher resume skills to show off the most important ones related to the job. This makes your abilities more visible to recruiters and makes it easier for your resume to pass the ATS scan. List them after your education and keep soft skills and hard skills separate since they serve different purposes.
Here are some of the most sought-after hard skills for teachers:
There are also some field-specific skills that depend on the subject that you teach, like knowledge of mathematics, chemistry, physics, etc.
After those, add some of the soft skills, such as:
Including a few optional sections is the perfect way to dress up your teacher’s resume. You can do it as long as you have room left on your document after you've added all of the necessary information. Of course, you want to make sure the optional information is relevant to the job position.
Certifications make you even more credible as a professional and show motivation and dedication to constantly improving. You can include them as part of your education if they are highly related to it. Otherwise, create a separate section after all the mandatory ones and list them there.
Language skills are welcome on any teacher’s resume. Naturally, if you teach foreign languages, this type of knowledge will be mandatory. But even if your position doesn't explicitly require this type of expertise, you can add this section to make your document more impressive.
Insert this part after your education section and arrange languages by your skill level:
This section allows you to be you. Forget about relevance, hard skills, and expertise for a moment and list something you’re truly passionate about. Keep this part brief, and don’t be surprised if it ends up being a conversational topic during your interview.
Do you know those students who go above and beyond at every assignment, making you delighted to give them straight As? You want to be that student in the eyes of a recruiter by submitting a cover letter with your teacher’s resume.
Ignore the fact that cover letters are optional because they are actually vital to your application process. Every time you apply for a new job, write a unique, personalized cover letter to show your diligence and dedication, and structure it like this:
