You help other teachers in small groups or one-on-one settings to provide personalized guidance for students with special needs. You may even work with a therapist during activities and games designed to help individual students succeed.
But you might have some questions about your resume: What skills should you include, and how should it look when you’re done?
Not to worry! We’ve helped tons of teaching assistants in various niches find their pathways to success, and these three resume examples can give you a great starting point.
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Job Experience
Your field requires a very well-rounded set of skills! From teaching abilities to technology, recruiters want to know about all the top tools you’ve mastered.
Just ensure that anything you include is extremely relevant to your profession. Sometimes your job utilizes common programs like MS Excel or Google Docs, but as long as you’re specific about them (instead of just saying “MS Suite” or “Google Suite”) then you can include them. Just use your experience section to give them unique context later!
Keep all your skills highly specific. Mention programs and classroom-related techniques by name whenever you can. Here are some examples:
9 best Special Education Teacher Assistant skills
- Google Slides
- MS Excel
- Flexibility
- Patience
- Conflict Resolution
- Development Records
- Progress Assessments
- Parent/Therapist Talks
- Lesson Adaptation
Sample Special Education Teacher Assistant work experience bullet points
It’s time to spice up those skills by putting them with examples of having used them in the past! As we mentioned before, you can use experiences as context to add intrigue to more run-of-the mill programs to show why they’re so integral to your job.
Your job experience bullet points also show recruiters that you can adapt to various situations, which is crucial for a special needs teacher assistant. Talk about times when you dramatically adapted lesson plans to fit an individual student’s needs or came up with a fun, new motivation system to boost grades.
And never forget to supplement those success stories with quantifiable metrics! Recruiters want to see numerical data that shows how well your efforts turned out.
Here are some samples:
- Designed 146+ auditory, visual, and tactile lessons to improve student engagement by 23%
- Prepared students for assessment tests by mentoring students one-on-one, increasing overall test scores by 14% and earning a personal rating of 4.8/5.0 stars
- Provided friendly customer service to generate loyal clients, contributing to a 6% increase in annual application rates
- Encouraged exploration by initiating field trips, improving student engagement levels by 23%
Top 5 Tips for Your Special Education Teacher Assistant resume
- Highlight your certifications
- Special Education (SPED) licensure, CPR certifications, Child Development Associate (CDA)—include them all! In fact, they deserve their own section so that recruiters can see how thorough you are.
- Use your objective carefully
- If you’re switching careers from general education to special education (or moving over from a completely different field that doesn’t relate to teaching at all), you might want a resume objective. Just make sure each piece of information you include is fresh and non-repetitive.
- Pick an impressive template
- And what’s most impressive about the resume’s template is you and your qualifications! So try out a variety of our templates and see which one places the biggest emphasis on your greatest teaching achievements.
- Prioritize legibility
- Just as you’d take extra measures to keep each assignment super easy to read, you should make your resume extremely readable for recruiters. They don’t have much time to spend skimming. Don’t distract them with loud colors or strange fonts.
- Use concise wording
- Hand-in-hand with visual readability goes your writing style! You’ve got lots of information to pack into those bullet points about lesson planning and grade increases, so just stick with the essentials: What you did, how, why, and the measurable end results.
Sort of—but not entirely! Just refer back to the job description for any specific school mission statements, teaching methods, or key programs they use. Reflect anything you already align with back in your resume.
You might not need them, but they just might help! Professional letters of recommendation can really boost your credibility if you’re changing careers or entering a niche like special education.
No matter how many awesome achievements you have under your belt, keep everything at or under one page. Remember: Recruiters don’t have much time to spend on your resume and they want to see how you’ll benefit students right away.
