5 Resume Mistakes you’re Making as a Transitioning Educator
Over on the Classroom to Boardroom podcast, I caught up with my good friend and resume specialist Jessica Seiler to talk about the five mistakes educators make on their resumes when they’re ready to leave the classroom. These tips can apply to all fields when building a resume. However, a resume for a teaching position and a resume for a marketing associate should be vastly different, and you might not always know the latest tricks.
Jessica and I are here to share the dirty little secrets about what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for and, just as importantly, what they’re not looking for.
Listen to the full episode
1. You’re Wasting Crucial Space
If your name and your personal information is taking up the majority of your page, it’s almost a red flag to your employer that you don’t have enough experience and things to highlight to fill a full page. If your resume is two or three pages long, that’s also a red flag because you’re showing you can’t write concisely.
The right formatting makes a resume so much cleaner, more efficient, and easier to read.
While you don’t want unnecessary elements taking up too much space, you also don’t want too much going on. Formatting that is highly visual can be beneficial for a career in design, but you can’t go overboard and confuse your recruiter or hiring manager with too much to look at. We’ll talk about this in a minute, but you want the highlight on your experience, not on the Canva template you used.
Use appropriate font sizes, not too big and not too small.
Use classic and clean elements and fonts that won’t be too distracting.
Show your personality, but also be professional and fit the tone of the business you’re applying to.
Never use comic sans. Just don’t do it.
2. You’re still using a Summary
This mistake is based on our experience and our opinions as recruiters and people who frequently work with resumes. You may hear differently from other sources, but we have seen more resumes than we can count and worked with numerous companies, and we say to stop using a summary.
You might be asking why, and the answer is: no one’s taking the time to read it.
They’re interested in your real experience, the tasks you completed, and the results you earned. Summaries are so often redundant of your cover letter and the rest of your resume that it’s just another waste of space.
If it’s so important for you to share, you should be able to squeeze it into your bullet points under your previous experience or your skills.
If you really need to say it, keep it to one short and sweet sentence. Don’t let it take up crucial space.
Better yet, don’t use a summary at all. Put it in your cover letter.
3. You’re not Highlighting results
Say your first listed experience is “fourth-grade teacher.” You probably listed “writes weekly lesson plans” or “developed math curriculum map.”
Well, the truth is, everyone thinks they know what an elementary teacher does, so they’re going to skip your bullet points.
What they need to know is that you know how to make good decisions that will impact the bottom line of a business. You have to start thinking about numbers. An example of this for a teacher would be “created and implemented after-school program that increased student math scores by 7%.” Or maybe you started a “student accountability initiative that resulted in an increased attendance rate of 98% in my classroom.” Whatever you did, there are numbers to attach to it.
Go find the data.
And don’t forget that you’ve done fundraising and you’ve worked with the PTO and you’ve done so much outside of your classroom. How much money did your fundraiser earn and how were you responsible for it? You get the picture.
Data, data, data. There’s data for everything, even if it’s not something you thought of before.
Don’t limit yourself to what you’ve done for your students. You’ve had numerical impacts elsewhere.
4. You’re Highlighting Soft Skills
When building a resume, you have soft skills and hard skills. Soft skills would be things like “collaborative” and “problem solver,” whereas hard skills would be like “certified in Microsoft Office Suite.” Soft skills are things we all are and we all can do. We’re all problem solvers, we’re all team players. What else do you have?
What makes you different from the rest of us? What skills are more unique to you and your ideal role?
If you’re putting something like “problem solver” at the top of your skills bullet list, that only tells us and other recruiters that you didn’t have anything else to put there.
As an educator, you’re probably not used to talking about money or business-related goals. So, in your resume and your interview, talk about the bottom line in student growth. Your currency isn’t dollars in a school setting, it’s growth.
This might be difficult if you have little to no industry experience in the field you’re applying for. My suggestion would be to look at other example resumes, the resumes of people in your role, and all of your research on the industry to see where your educator skills can transfer. As an educator, you solve problems all day long. What specific problems can you solve and how can you do it?
Skip the skills that are soft and that every other applicant has.
Don’t lie, but highlight the skills they’re asking for in the job listing if you have them.
Connect the dots between skills. What skills can go together and save space?
What skills make you stand out?
5. You’re not organizing correctly
If the first thing I see on your resume is “fourth-grade teacher,” I’m probably not calling you for an interview.
You need to create space at the top of your resume so the first thing I see is your name, clean and noticeable. Then have a way for them to contact you. Your email and phone number are crucial.
Next, you want all of your hard skills clear and distinct. If you're interviewing for an EdTech company, they definitely want to see that you have skills in a bunch of different products. But don’t make it a laundry list. Only put what you can speak confidently about and things that made a difference in your classroom.
Next, add your experience. List your experience by what is most relevant to the role you’re applying for. So, if you’re applying for an EdTech company geared toward teaching math to K-6 students, you’ll want to have your experience teaching third-grade math before your experience as a high school biology teacher. Under your experience, list everything that made you a superstar in that role. What products and solutions did you use that really boosted student performance? Did you have a leadership role? What did you do to support your students and school that wasn’t asked of you?
If you’re a transitioning educator feeling a little stuck or uninspired with your resume, the best thing you can do is get feedback from experts and those with a similar goal. This is where your network comes in handy! In the Classroom to Boardroom Community, we see and encourage teachers sharing their resumes and best tips so we can learn from one another and grow together.
