How to write a great special education teacher resume?

For a special education teacher, school doesn’t end after university. You’ll be spending plenty of time studying, learning and applying different techniques that might or might not work on certain students.

Oftentimes, it will not be a walk in the park and requires someone with a strong personality. Personal traits such as patience, adaptability, perseverance and strong assessment skills are a must for this career.

You’d be surprised, but such traits will definitely come in handy when creating your special education teacher resume, just take a look at the following tips:

1. Start with a captivating special education resume summary

Regardless of whether you want to work at a private or public school, a residential facility, hospital or even at a student’s home. You alway want to properly assess the needs of your potential employer.

Why? Because this will allow you to tailor your resume and create a captivating special education resume summary that speaks their language.

A good way to do so is by going over the job posting and drawing inspiration from the key traits and skills that they’re searching for. Write the ones you possess and add them on your resume summary to get their attention from the get-go.

Also add strong achievements, relevant positions, and other skills you think they might benefit from. Just make sure to quantify them.

In the end, it should look something along these lines:

2. Showcase your best skills on your special education resume

As a special education teacher, your main role will be in teaching and nurturing students’ skills. It’s not surprising that a skilled person is essential for the job.

A good way to showcase your skill-set is by creating a skills resume section in which you list your strongest and most relevant skills.

Try to include both soft skills and hard skills.

Also, as a good rule of thumb. Don’t just add a skill section and call it good, you need to make sure you reinforce such skills throughout your entire resume.

Just like a teacher reinforcing a topic, you want to keep reminding an employer that you’ve got what it takes to be an astounding special education teacher.

Find out your resume score!

Our AI Resume checker can scan your resume for issues and give you tips on how you can improve it.

Get my resume score

3. Impress them with your special education work experience

As we stated before, a special education teacher can work in various environments. It is important that you take this into consideration when drafting the work experience section of your resume.

For example, if you’re to work in a hospital setting you will probably benefit from adding work experience related to the field, such as volunteering at a blood drive. This might not be as relevant if you decide to work at a school.

When it comes down to it, special education teachers vary greatly from one another due to their field of interest and the more relevant you can make this section to the job listing the more likely you are to get hired.

4. Put your special education teacher training to good use

As for your resume's education section, you will be required to prove you have a degree in special education.

This section of your resume can be rather important if you’re straight out of college, as you might lack experience.

In such a case, add your GPA if above 3.0, relevant coursework, and other achievements you gained through your time in school.

However, if you have worked or volunteered in a relevant position, make sure to give more attention to them instead. As most applicants will have a similar educational background and this will distinguish you more.

All in all, your education section should be kept short and sweet.

5. Extra sections to put on your special education teacher resume

A good way to separate you from the competition is by adding extra sections to your resume that will showcase your uniqueness and expertise.

Just make sure the sections are relevant to the position.

You can list the extra sections as seen below: