Ultimate resume guide:
How to make a great resume for an English teaching job.

If you’re planning on looking for a new teaching job, one of the most important things to do is to first make sure that your resume is up to scratch.

Given the fact that teaching positions often require very similar qualifications and have very similar job descriptions, most teaching resumés that recruiters receive are very similar to each other. This gives you an advantage! By creating a resumé that is attention-grabbing, showcases your personality, and includes details specific to the position you’re applying for, you can spark the interest of your future employer more easily.

Stop! Before doing anything listen to an actual ESL recruiter:

Many people rush into making a resume without considering who will be opening it and how they can best connect with this person. We can’t emphasize enough how important it is to understand how things work from the perspective of the recruiter. Luckily, our course tutor Heather used to teach English in China, and also worked in ESL recruitment before she joined World TESOL Academy.

This might sound quite harsh, but that’s the blunt reality of what happens when you send your resume to a recruiter, agency, or school. They’ll usually have a lot of other applications coming in, and will have limited time to look at each resume.

Now, let’s make a great teaching resume:

Keeping this information in mind, below we’ll start to look at how to write a great resume. We’ll do this in three stages. First, we’ll look at where to get a good resume template (forget about using Microsoft Word). Second, we’ll look at what content should go into the resume. Third, we’ll look at what to write and how to write it.

1. Where to get a good teaching resume template:

The first thing that many people do when starting a new resume is to open up Microsoft Office and write “NAME – Resume” at the top of the page. 20 years ago this might have been a good way to start your resume, but this is 2021, and there are much better ways to write a resume now.

There are numerous websites online with easy-to-use tools to help you make a high-quality and professional resume. These websites will usually charge money for some features/templates, but they’ll often have some free templates that could still give you a great resume.

Here are a few websites where you can find good teaching resumé templates:

• Canva Resume
• Resume.io
  
• TeachersPayTeachers
• Visual CV

When picking a resume template, it’s important to make sure that you consider the position you’re applying for. The type of template that select for an adult learner class would be quite different from the template that you’d use for a young learner class.

You’ll need to browse through the various platforms and templates online and find a few templates that fit both the position you’re applying for and also match your personality. Whichever template you choose to go with, just make sure that it is no more than 2 pages in length. It’s a rule of thumb that if you can’t fit the information on two pages of A4, you’re writing too much (and recruiters likely won’t read to the third page of a resume).

3. What to write in your resume:

Before writing your resume you should spend some time collecting all of the relevant information about yourself. It’s good to do this before actually writing it into the resume itself to make sure that you have everything planned out beforehand. Below we’ll explore several vital sections that you should include in your teaching resumé.

• A concise objective:

At the top of your resumé, you should write a few sentences about your overall qualifications and the reason why you’re applying for this specific job. This should be very specific to the school and position you’re applying for, so make sure to research this thoroughly. Your objective should be a quick, 3-4 sentences summary of what makes you a great candidate for this teaching position.

In just a few sentences, you’ll be able to convey a huge amount of information to the recruiter. The same information should be included in the details of your resume, but with this short objective at the start, you’re able to frame your experience and personality in a way that matches what the recruiter would like to see.

• An introduction video:

This is something that 99% of people miss out on when making a resume for a teaching job. Just underneath your objective is the perfect place to include a link to an introduction video. As most resumes are viewed digitally nowadays, it’s quite easy to include such a link. In your video you’ll be able to mention similar things to your objective, summarise some more information from your resume, and perhaps include some of your likes and interests. By doing this, you’ll also be able to show off your language skills, personality, and confidence. This is something that could be especially useful for non-native teachers as you’ll be able to show the school/recruiter just how good your language skills are.

Pro-tip: YouTube allows you to privately upload videos and get a direct link to them, however, keep in mind YouTube isn’t available in all countries. China, for example, blocks access to YouTube as the government isn’t able to moderate the content on it. This means that if you’re applying for a job in China, you would want to host your video on a Chinese site instead (such as YouKu).

• Relevant experience:

We can’t emphasize this enough – only focus on relevant work experience.

This is something that many people make mistakes with. When writing their resumes, they’ll add every possible piece of work experience they’ve ever had, believing that more is better. This is absolutely not the case when it comes to teaching positions. Schools are looking for teaching experience or transferable skills that could be applied to teaching scenarios.

If you have 7 years of experience managing a team of engineers, you’ll probably have enough information to fill a whole page about your projects, responsibilities, and achievements. But a school simply wouldn’t be interested in this. They would be more interested to know that you had once spent a summer tutoring your neighbor’s kid in the subjects of maths and history. By adding volumes of information about your engineering expertise, you’ll actually be reducing your chances of getting hired, as the school would be looking to hire a teacher – not an engineer.

Take a look at the examples below:

This should give you an idea of how to maximize relevant details and minimize irrelevant ones.

What if you don’t have any previous teaching experience? You should read our guide here – How to get a job without previous experience – and also put more emphasis on your education and skills.

• Prior education: 

This is one of the most basic sections in every resumé. You should include your most important education starting with your highest achievements first. It’s common to find that teaching positions require a bachelor’s degree. If you have one then you should certainly make sure that it’s clearly mentioned here. If you’re currently enrolled in a degree course but haven’t finished, you can list it here with your expected graduation date. If you haven’t completed a degree, and aren’t on a degree course, don’t worry. There are still lots of opportunities out there for teachers without degrees. It could require focusing on some specific areas, and preparing more thoroughly, but it’s absolutely still possible to secure both overseas and online work without a degree.

• Teaching certifications: 

Most English teaching positions require their teachers to have a teaching certificate. You might find some jobs that say they’ll provide a teaching certificate for you, but such adverts should set off alarm bells (they’ll most likely be providing very low-quality courses and placing you in schools that you probably wouldn’t want to work in).

If you have completed an accredited teaching course (such as a TESOL/TEFL course) and have your certificate, you should make sure to note it clearly on your resumé. You can also add a few details about how many hours of training you went through and the date of completion. It is also recommendable to include the name of the center where you took the course and its accreditations to build up your credibility.

• Relevant skills:

Including your skills in your teaching resumé will be particularly important if you don’t have any previous teaching experience. This is the section where you can show off what you can bring to the table as a new teacher in the school you’re applying to.

Some of the skills you can mention are things that you’ll have learned from your teacher training courses (TESOL/TEFL, or TEYL). These could be things like classroom management, lesson planning, devising reward systems etc.

You could also list other skills that you’ve developed through previous work/life experiences – just make sure they’re relevant for this position. Skills surrounding teaching/learning, creativity/design, language abilities, interpersonal skills, etc. could all be useful to mention. If you’re able to use Photoshop or do video editing, this could also be useful to mention as schools might recognize your potential to help with creating class materials.

Note: Many resume templates come with graphs or bars where you can mark your various skills out of 10, for example:  “Lesson planning skills: 8/10”. We strongly advise against using such icons/graphs. While they might look interesting and modern, they don’t actually help you when applying for jobs.  It’s much better to list skills without personal rankings and then during an interview you could explain what you’re most comfortable with.

• Contactable references: 

If you have some previous teaching experience, for example as a tutor, get in touch with your previous students and ask them for a short reference letter. You can also ask them to be your referees and ask for permission to include their e-mail address or phone number in your resumé. If you worked in a school before, contact your previous employer or your teacher colleagues from your last place of employment and ask them if they can write a reference letter for you.

Just make sure that if you do add references, you have up-to-date contact details for them, and that they’ve given consent to be contacted.

3. What to do next:

After you’ve made a great resume, you can save this as a base template. Then, when you find a job that you’d like to apply for, you can look for additional ways to adjust a copy of this template so that it better fits this specific position or school. For example, if the school is advertising for a part-time teacher to work on Tuesdays/Wednesdays/Fridays, then you should make sure to mention that in your objective. Make sure to read the description of the job very carefully! Sometimes, you’ll need to read between the lines and figure out what type of teacher this particular school or employer is looking for.

If you follow all of the advice in this guide you should end up with a great resume that can help to increase your chances of getting hired. Just make sure to save it as a .PDF (not .DOC), send it over to the school, and cross your fingers!