How do I write about my teaching experience on my CV or resume?
Hi everyone! My name is Elaine Jessica Tamargo, and I’m a Graduate Educational Development Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching. I’ve also worked in career services for nearly a decade, focusing more recently on career and professional development for graduate students.
It’s the end of the quarter, finally! Many of us are wrapping up our TA appointments with a nice big stack of papers to grade or exams to proctor. But before you shake off every remnant of the academic year, I encourage you to take some time to update your CV or resume (or both!). Even if you are not graduating or completing your program this year, it is good practice to update your CV or resume every quarter. That way, you don’t have to rack your brain trying to remember the small details of your many graduate student positions and accomplishments several years later. Here are a few tips specifically for updating your CV or resume with your teaching experience:
Do you need a CV, a resume, or both? While “CV” and “resume” are sometimes used interchangeably, it is important to remember that they are different from one another. The key differences pertain to length and usage. Short version: a resume is a more concise 1-2 page document used in industry and non-academic settings, and a CV is a more comprehensive overview document used in academic, research, and scientific settings. Long version: check out this resource from the UCLA Career Center and make a 1:1 appointment with a career consultant to discuss which type of document is best for your purposes (ucla.joinhandshake.edu). Knowing that many of us are leaving our options open, I’ll discuss both here.
Both resumes and CVs require being intentional about the structure and information that you include. If you are just updating your CV or resume for your reference, include more information than you need for now. You can always think about removing or reorganizing the information when tailoring your documents for a specific purpose. For now, include:
Your role (Reader, Teaching Assistant, Teaching Associate, Teaching Fellow)
The university and department name
Instructor name and contact info (though you usually won’t list this on your documents, this is helpful for filling out those pesky online applications)
The course name
Undergraduate or graduate course?
Course structure (e.g. lecture with discussion section, seminar, lab)
The dates/quarters of your appointment
A short description of your responsibilities and accomplishments
On a CV, your teaching experience will look more like a list. Because CVs are used in academic settings, you do not typically describe your teaching experience in much detail. You have probably seen that many CVs simply list the courses taught in reverse chronological order. But actually, you have control over how this list looks so that it best showcases the strengths of your teaching experience.
List ALL of your university/college instructor, TA, and reader experiences, BUT list any K-12 or non-higher education teaching positions separately. If you are using your CV to apply for college or university academic positions, those search committees will prioritize your experience working with college students. Other teaching or tutoring experiences are valuable, but you do not want those to get in the way of showcasing your experiences with university-level teaching.
Organize your teaching experiences by type: Do you have teaching experiences in several departments? Have you taught both undergrads and graduate students? Have you taught at other institutions besides UCLA? Do you want to emphasize some aspects of your teaching? If so, use that as an organizational structure. The following table has some examples of how the same person can organize their teaching experiences in different ways:
Let me stress again, what might be right for one person might not work as well for you!
On a resume, you have the opportunity to present your teaching experience in different ways. Because a resume has limited space and must be tailored to the positions you’re applying for, the information you include about your teaching on your resume will be very different from the extended list that would appear on your CV. Unlike the audiences reading a CV, however, non-academic employers do not tend to be well-versed in understanding the relevance of TA experience to the positions for which they are recruiting.
To help with space, you could compress all of your TAing experiences into one entry. Instead of thinking of each TA appointment as a separate job, think of your entire UCLA TA experience as one job position with multiple projects. In a way, it makes sense–UCLA was your employer the entire time. If you TA’ed or taught at other institutions, you typically list those as their own separate positions; however, it is possible that you could combine these with your UCLA TA positions as well.
Hooray! You get to describe more about your experience using bullet points on your resume! This is not, however, an open invitation to write a long list of the course titles or copy/paste your job responsibilities from your offer letter! Think about what are the most important skills from your TA experience that translate to the position you are applying to. What teaching methods did you employ that are relevant to the position? What accomplishments do you have to show for your time as a TA? How did you make a positive impact on the department, the course, the teaching team, and/or your students? Why does your teaching experience make you a better candidate for this position than another applicant?
Can I adjust some of my language to better connect to the employer reading my resume? When you are at the stage of tailoring your resume for a job application, take some time to do a close reading of the job description. Then, do some fine-tune editing on how you describe your skills and accomplishments so that you sound like the people who wrote that job description. For example, if you are applying to a client-focused job, think about changing “students and other TAs” to “clients and collaborators.”
These are just a few tips for updating your teaching experience on your CV or resume. Make sure to seek out resources from your department, colleagues, and professional organizations to get more specific advice for your discipline.
Additional Resources:
CV vs. Resume Handout from the UCLA Career Center
Resources for building your CV from UCLA Career Center and Harvard GSAS
Advice for building your resume and your CV from Inside Higher Ed