Resume Help: Bullet Points

Summary: When you’re writing your teacher bullet points for your resume, you need to prioritize beating the ATS with an ATS-friendly format and exact word matches. You also need to highlight and quantify your top 4-5 most significant results.

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Disclaimer: I aim to be transparent in my writing on this website and in my personal conversations with other teachers. When it comes to posts about resumes, I gotta be extra clear about it.

Here’s what I am: A regular guy in real life. A current instructional designer with two years of experience. A former teacher with four years of experience. A person who owns the words I write and the words I speak.

Here’s what I’m not: A hiring manager. A recruiter or HR professional. A paid resume writer. Any sort of credentialed person that you must absolutely listen to.

As with all of my posts and conversations, please, I encourage you to take what’s useful and to talk to as many people whose inputs and feedback you can trust.

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Resume Basics

I don’t want to spend too much time talking about this, and I think there’s plenty of resources out there. Here are 10 Resume Writing Tips To Help You Land a Job from Indeed that I shared in a previous post. I also like this YouTube video from Devlin Peck on How to Create an Instructional Design Resume.

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This past month I’ve been helping several teachers with their resumes as they apply for instructional designer roles. I have such a different perspective now that I’ve been working in the field for two years, especially at a company where there’s a hyper-focus on measuring and quantifying results. You’ll see what I mean as you read this post.

When I scan through resumes for the first time, almost every time, the first thing I’ll think is “You need to quantify your results.” In fact, when I picked up own resume again, I thought to myself, “How did I get a job with such weak results?” Weak results as in how they’re written on my resume, not that the actual results of my work were weak. HAHAHA. I was forced to revise my own resume because I didn’t want to come off as “Do what I say, not what I do.”

In this post, I’ll share two POVs on how you can write better teacher bullet points for your resume.

Point of View 1: Prioritize Getting Past the ATS

Prioritize getting past the ATS first. That means having an ATS-compliant/friendly format. Don’t use stars or checkmarks as your bullet points. Just stick to the plain bullet points. That means optimizing exact word matches and not cluttering your resume about how you became a vegetarian after watching the Netflix documentary The Game Changers.

Understand what you’re up against. You’re probably applying for jobs on LinkedIn or other similar websites which probably have hundreds of applicants for each one. (There were 284 applicants for the job where I got my first offer.) Recruiters are not going to sit there and read through every single resume. There’s not enough time in the world for that!

So of course your resume is going to go through an automated program before it reaches human eyes. Of course it could reject you from a job that you were fully qualified for. Of course that’s going to make you feel like shit.

Write your teacher bullet points (and entire resume) so that you can get past the ATS and have a fair chance to represent yourself in a human conversation.

I like this YouTube video from Self-Made Millennial on how she Got My Resume Through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) with a 95% Success Rate! You’re a human. Talk like a human when you get the chance to talk to a human. Don’t try to talk like a human to a computer.

My Point of View 2: Focus on the R in STAR

You did sooooo much as a teacher. I know you’re tempted to list 8-10 bullet points to try to cover it all. Don’t. Instead, highlight your top 4-5 most significant results. A lot of teacher bullet points that I see will address the Situation, Task, and Action (what they did), but they’ll completely omit the Results (what they achieved). I was guilty of the same thing.

On the topic of significant results, find a way to quantify those results. Make them tangible. This takes extra work. It means identifying what useful data you already have or what you need to additionally gather. Then it means getting close to numbers that you’re confident about.

For example, instead of just saying “Taught mathematics to 120+ students a year” you could say something like “Developed and implemented daily lesson plans for 120+ students a year with a 98% student passing rate.” See the difference?

Or how about this: “Analyzed learner data and designed quarterly formative assessments to address performance gaps which increased state test scores by an average of 12% per learner.”

You already dig into your students’ learning data to inform your teaching. Now extend that data analysis to measure your own results as a teacher.

My Teacher Bullet Points

I’ll share my own teacher bullet points below. I’m in a good spot and a bad spot. I’m in a good spot because I’m already an instructional designer so prospective employers would care more about my experience as an instructional designer than as a teacher. I’m in a bad spot because I’m two years removed from being a teacher and having access to all of the data I need to write great teacher bullet points. So this is what I’ve settled with:

• Designed, developed, and implemented daily lesson plans by applying learning theories, teaching methodologies, and learning technologies to achieve at least a 93% student passing rate annually
• Analyzed historical learner data to identify Student Learning Outcomes and evaluated learning with formative and summative assessments to increase state standardized test scores for 100% of students annually
• Differentiated instruction for two Response To Intervention (RTI) Tier 2 classes annually which enabled 100% of students to pass their Tier 1 class
• Served on the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) team to promote positive school behavior and increase academic achievement, evidenced by the reduction of tardiness and discipline referrals to less than 10% of the student body

My Rationale

I emphasized two POVs in this post: Prioritize getting past the ATS and focus on the R in STAR.

I use plain bullet points as part of my ATS-friendly resume format. For exact word matches, I hit each word of the ADDIE acronym once: Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. I keep my teacher bullet points to four for the reasons I mentioned earlier– my instructional designer experience matters more now, and I don’t have the data I need to write great teacher bullet points. The results that I quantified are guaranteed for me. I can confidently explain them because they’re true.

But I’m not gonna act like my bullet points are what every teacher needs to have on their resume. If I explained the data analysis behind them, I promise that you wouldn’t be impressed haha.

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There you have it. The first way to improve your teacher bullet points on your resume is to prioritize beating the ATS by using an ATS-friendly format and getting exact word matches. The second way is to focus on the results you achieved and quantifying those results.

Would you like to meet to discuss your teacher bullet points? Do you have suggestions on how I can improve my teacher bullet points or other achievements I could list? Let’s connect and help each other out.