Even before earning her arts education degree, Ashley Doyle knew she wanted to help others as a substitute. At first, she wasn’t sure how her restaurant server skills could reinforce her career shift to an entry-level substitute teacher’s role. But luckily, she found some priceless tips in our resume examples.
Ashley considered the skills she’d gained at Red Lobster: Did her time management, friendly attitude, and prioritization abilities translate to the classroom? Heck ya! After framing her server experience in a way that reinforced her more recent stint as a teacher assistant, she felt confident in her professional background to land her dream job at Arrow Academy.
For folks like you writing an entry-level substitute teacher resume, we’ve assembled some helpful resume templates and tips for writing everything from a career objective to your ideal AI cover letter!
Why this resume works
- “Ugh, this is too much.” That’s the likely reaction of a hiring manager slogging through a two-pager that is your entry-level substitute teacher resume crammed with every conceivable reason you’re the top pick. Trust us, keeping it to one page is your best bet.
- Yes, you can impress without the fluff. Our suggestion? Stick to the experience that matters for this role, like when you rocked it as a teaching assistant. In addition, don’t overlook the skills you’ve picked up elsewhere, like your time as a server—being empathetic, detail-savvy, and perhaps even multilingual is gold for this junior role.
What Matters Most: Your Entry-Level Substitute Teacher Skills & Work Experience
One of the first things you’ll probably wonder is, what skills do you list if you don’t have much teaching experience?
Start with any skills you’ve gained from relevant higher education or obtaining your substitute teaching license. Those experiences probably taught you a lot about teaching strategies and classroom management, which will be highly applicable. Also, look at the job description to emphasize skills related to what the school wants candidates to have.
Here are some popular entry-level substitute teaching skills in 2025.
9 popular entry-level substitute teacher skills
- Classroom Supervision
- Differentiated Learning
- Microsoft Office
- Lesson Plans
- Classroom Safety
- Conflict Resolution
- Student Relations
- Student Records
- Lecture Delivery
Sample entry-level substitute teacher work experience bullet points
When schools need to bring in a substitute teacher at a moment’s notice, they’ll want to know they have reliable candidates who can perform effectively.
While you may not have much teaching experience, you can still put many great examples here. For instance, think about other work experiences involving customer service or performing on a tight schedule that’ll translate.
You can also take examples from what you achieved while studying for your substitute teaching certificate or other non-traditional work, such as volunteering.
Here are a few samples:
- Greeted over 65 customers per day, providing friendly service and answering any questions to achieve 98% positive satisfaction scores.
- Diligently studied materials on creating lesson plans and assessing student behavior to achieve a 97% overall grade on the substitute teaching certificate final exam.
- Handled service requests from over 20 customers per day, using quick data management skills to solve 95% of issues in 30 minutes or less.
- Used key presentation skills, such as setting up PowerPoints for visuals and speaking in a clear and engaging cadence during presentations for a communications class, receiving a 96% overall grade.
Top 5 Tips for Your Entry-Level Substitute Teacher Resume
- Use a numerical impact
- All your examples should use a numerical impact to showcase what you achieved. It’ll help you stand out in a results-driven school environment where test scores and assignment completion rates must always be optimized for success.
- Always proofread
- When schools review entry-level resumes, every detail matters to make your abilities to manage student records and lesson plans shine through. Start things off right with an accurate resume that is free of grammatical errors.
- Keep it organized
- Consider how you’d put together a lesson plan for your students. You’d want to have clear headers, bullet points with key statistics you want to cover, and an easily readable font. Your resume should be organized with those same principles in mind.
- Reverse chronological formatting is the best fit
- When you don’t have much experience, you want to optimize what you put at the top of your resume. Therefore, listing your most recent experiences first related to managing lesson plans or classroom supervision is ideal.
- Transferable skills matter
- Several transferable skills like leadership, customer service, data analysis, and teamwork can relate to teaching. When you don’t have much experience leading a classroom, lean on abilities like these as needed to fill out your resume with relevant details.
A resume objective is a great idea for substitute teachers who don’t have much experience. It’s a great way to showcase a few sentences about your most relevant skills, like four years of customer service experience and maintaining 97% positive satisfaction scores.
A hobbies & interests section can be a great way to display additional skills if you’re struggling to fill up a full one-page resume. For instance, if you were a member of your college’s improv club, it would show applicable abilities to come up with quick solutions as a teacher.
When classroom safety and helping students achieve high grades is a must, schools will want to see a full one-page resume of relevant information to decide you’re the right fit. If you’re struggling, focusing on educational experience, hobbies & interests, or including a resume objective can all help fill up more space.
Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of BeamJobs. He started his career in data fulfilling the dream of little kids everywhere: working for an insurance company. He then moved on to work in edtech for a company called Chegg before venturing out to start BeamJobs. Things have come a long way after countless “learnings” (fancy word for mistakes), and BeamJobs has now helped 2.5M+ people create their perfect resume. Stephen and BeamJobs have been featured on awesome sites like Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, Dallas News, Baltimore Sun, the Daily Press, Zendesk, HubSpot, and loads more.
