Craft Your Teaching Resume – in 8 Simple Steps

Whether you’re about to start hunting for our very first teaching job or you’re seeking out greener pastures, it can be frustrating and anxiety- inducing when it comes time to create or write your resume. Luckily, I have moved around a lot in my career ( inside and out of education), so I’ve been around the block a few times! Let me help you craft a teaching resume that is polished, professional, unique, AND gets you that interview! If you’ve already landed an interview, make sure to check out this post on teacher interview questions!

1. Before You Begin Your Teaching Resume

Before you start adding to your resume, make a brain dump of everything you have done in your career. Even if you have a resume already – what have you done in your current position that isn’t on your resume yet? Get out a notepad or whiteboard and spend several minutes making a list of:

• Your educational degrees, noteworthy college classes or accomplishments
• Professional licenses, certificates, and endorsements
• Any trainings, presentations, and professional development you developed and/ or delivered
• Special accomplishments in your career ( or student teaching if you’re a newbie)
• Classes you’ve taught, including curriculum you’ve developed yourself
• Decision making or other school teams or groups you’ve lead or been a part of
• What defines your teaching philosophy
• What kind of school/ team you’d like to be a part of

2. Find a (FREE) Template

Google and Microsoft both have a ton of resume templates, or you can start with this free resume template in my TpT store It’s the resume template I use myself, and it’s done in Google Slides, which makes it super easy to customize and move around blocks of text. I also like that I can easily duplicate a slide so that I can have multiple versions for different types of positions. I can download it as a PDF which makes sure the formatting stays as-is when I upload it to an application or send it out.

Whatever you do, keep your resume simple. Unless you’re an elementary teacher, graphics of crayons or worms and apples might be a little too gimmicky and turn off administrators. I once thought it would be cool to make my resume Alice in Wonderland themed. Great in theory, but not so great in practice. My resume is classic black and white with powder blue headings. It stands out but is still sleek.

3. Write your Professional Summary

It can be beneficial, especially if you’ve been teaching for a while, to include a professional summary. In this professional summary you can mention your most recent special projects, your teaching philosophy, and where you’d like to see your career grow and or what kind of a team environment you’re looking to be a part of.  In short, your professional summary should be an elevator speech and should explain what makes you a great fit or value add to a school and a little bit about your personality as well. Highlight your accomplishments and career goals, while still showing your humility and willingness to continue to learn and improve your craft in collaboration with others.

Here’s a professional summary that I have used in the past:

4. Buff Up Your Teaching Experience

The next most important part of your resume is your teaching experience. If you don’t have a lot, you can include any education- adjacent experience. Start with your most recent position. List the position, school name, city, and years worked.

This is the hard part. From your brainstorm you may be tempted to list every single thing you did while working at the school. Don’t! You want to make sure that you emphasize the highlights from each job you’ve had that really make your resume stand out from other applicants. Every teacher aligns curriculum to the standards. What makes you different (read: better) than the other teachers applying for this job? Focus on specific skills you’ve developed or special roles that you had that tie into your leadership skills and align with what schools are looking for. Avoid repeating yourself and write unique skills from each position.

Another tip: Make sure to write in past tense, and don’t use “I” or add periods at the end of each list item. Use rhetorically strong verbs like these.

• Any work you do to incorporate social emotional learning and culturally- responsive practices
• Valuing and supporting diversity in the classroom, building class culture
• Working with Language Learners or students on IEPs, including co-teaching
• Working collaboratively or in PLC’s
• Any special committees you served on, school-wide projects you participated in, or other duties that went above and beyond your classroom teacher duties.

5. Add your Education, Certifications, & Professional Training

 The next part of the teacher resume is education and training. You can choose to have one section for education and another section for certificates and trainings that you’ve attended, or you can combine them. This all depends on the template you chose. This is where you list:

• Your degrees ( minus a GPA, unless you are a newbie and your GPA was stellar)
• Honors you received or relevant accomplishments you achieved while in school
• Any outside trainings or professional development that resulted in a certificate or was particularly meaningful
• Conferences you attended or presented at
• Technology, safety, or other certifications you achieved

6. Update Your Contact Info

Make sure your future supervisor knows how to reach you! There’s little need these days to include a physical address, but I like to include:

• Phone number
• Email address
• My online portfolio (this is optional)
• My LinkedIn profile (also optional)

I created a really simple Google Site that is essentially an extension of my resume. It also includes some sample projects and my list of references. I include my LinkedIn because I have a pretty common name, and there are a LOT of social media profiles that I might not want future employers to think are mine. This way they can see the professional way I’d like to present myself first.

7. Put Your Teaching Resume Together!

Now that you have everything you need, there’s just a few things left to do to perfect this work of art!

• Make sure it is ONE PAGE LONG. I have been asked about this a lot, especially for people who have been in the workforce a while. You want your resume to be a CURATED representation of the best of you. Your resume is a charcuterie board, not the cheese and crackers aisle at King Soopers!
• Make sure all of the tenses are past
• Erase any periods in lists
• Double check spelling, grammar, and punctuation throughout

Finally, have someone else review it. Whether it’s a friend, your mom, or a trusted colleague, they are sure to catch the little things you may have missed.

8. Before You Go…

Make a list of references. Make a couple of phone calls to people who could put in a good word for you, and let old references know you’re looking again.

Save your resume as a PDF. This is the easiest and most professional way to share it with others. You can guarantee that the fonts will show correctly, the alignment will stay the same, and the person on the receiving end will be able to print it.

Always keep adding to and tweaking your resume. Even when I have no intentions of leaving a position, I keep a running resume as the year goes on. This way, if I ever do need a resume, its a much less monumental task to put it together.

What questions do you have about writing resumes? Let me know in the comments!