5 Easy Steps to Quantify Your Teacher Resume

One of the biggest challenges that transitioning teachers face is understanding how to quantify their skills and experiences in a way that easily translates to corporate language. In this post, you'll discover your step-by-step guide on how to write strong resume bullets that are quantified, corporate-friendly, and will make tailoring your resume a piece of cake.

 STEP 1: Start With the Basics- List Your Skills

The first step in quantifying your resume is defining your core competencies. This means taking a closer look at your professional experience, skills, and knowledge that you can transfer to a corporate environment. As a teacher, you may have excellent skills in communications, organization, interpersonal relationships, and leadership. Start by listing each of these skills you possess.

Need help identifying your skills? Check out the 33 Most In Demand Transferable Skills For Teachers 

 STEP 2: List Your Actions

For each skill you listed, write out everything you do in your role related to that skill. Perhaps you listed “organization” as a skill. One of your actions could be that you organized (or collaborated on a team that organized) school-wide special events. Examples include the science fair, a fundraiser, curriculum nights, or a community engagement event.

STEP 3: Add Your Results

Next, focus on results instead of just the tasks. For each of the actions you listed in step 2, write down the outcome(s) that you produced instead of just listing your duties. Quantify your impact by using hard facts and figures.

For example, instead of only stating that you organized a school event, highlight the number of people who attended the event, the amount of money raised, or how the event impacted student achievement. This will give potential employers a clearer picture of your capabilities and achievements as a teacher, which can be transferred over to the corporate world.

Sticking with the organization & special events example, say you supported your school’s fundraiser efforts. The amount your school earned as a result was $10K.

 
STEP 4: Use the STAR Method to Turn Your List into Resume Bullets

Now, you have a skill, an action, and a result. You’ll plug those pieces into the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method in order to transforming your skills into an expertly written resume bullet. Start by identifying a specific Situation (essentially, it is the problem you’re solving or the “why” you took an action). Then describe the Task you were responsible for, the Action(s) you took to accomplish that task, and finally the Results or outcomes of your efforts.

This format helps to provide context and tells a story about your experience as a teacher in a way that resonates with corporate employers. It also shows that you are skilled in problem-solving, decision-making, and executing strategies.

In the fundraiser example, it would look like this:

• Situation: Needed new technology in classrooms
• Task: Raise money to pay for new technology
• Action: Organize and execute a fundraiser to raise funds
• Result: $10K in profit

Plug these into my easy resume bullet formula, and voila!

[Compelling verb] [brief explanation of accomplishment] resulting in [quantifiable outcome, %, $, #, etc. are always helpful!].

So, your resume bullet would look like this:

• Organized and executed school-wide fundraiser resulting in $10K raised for classroom technology upgrades.

Want more resume bullet examples to use on your resume? Here are 11 real examples teachers have created using the STAR method.

 STEP 5: Tailor Your Resume to the Job by Highlighting Your Transferable Skills

After completing steps 1-4 for all the skills and actions you listed, you will have effectively created a rolodex of experiences you can use when tailoring your resume to a job description. You won’t use every bullet you create on one master resume but instead, you’ll use keywords from the job description, select from your list of experiences that match the employer's needs, and show how you can contribute to their goals. If the job description requires fundraising experience, you would definitely include the bullet from our fundraising example above. If not, you would select only your experiences most closely aligned to the requirements listed in the job description.

Avoid the #1 mistake most educators make when tailoring their resume.  Click here to see if you’ve already made it and how to quickly craft a killer tailored resume.

To help you decide what activity is relevant to add to a tailored resume, ask yourself these questions for each activity:

• How does this relate to the position I’m applying to?
• Is this one of the top three things I accomplished in this role?
• Would the skills I used for this task be transferable or relevant to the job I’m applying for?
• Is this something I’d be excited to talk about during an interview?

Keep in mind that generally, you’ll want to select between three and five key achievements for each role you include on your resume. Be selective and do your best to feature your key achievements that are not only relevant but impressive, impactful, and quantifiable.

Transitioning from the classroom to the corporate world may seem like a daunting task but by following the above steps on how to quantify your resume, you will effectively quantify your teaching experience, translate it into a language that speaks to potential employers, and significantly increase your chances of landing that dream corporate role.