Dance Teacher Finder

Now that you’ve written your resume, the final step is make sure it’s the perfect length.

Your resume should be 1 page, not any longer unless you have 10+ years combined experience as a dance teacher or professional dancer.

If you’ve been following these blog entries and have written your resume already and it’s more than 1 page and you have less than 10 years of experience, then you need to edit it.

On the flip side, make sure you don’t have a significant amount of white space (like if say your resume is only half a page).  The first impression the studio owner would have when opening your resume would be that you are a person without much credentials for the job, and obviously that’s not the first impression you want to give.

The first step to solve either of these problems (too long or too short) would be to change the margins or the font size to make it shorter or longer.  If you do this only change this slightly; if your resume goes from being Times New Roman size 12 to Times New Roman size 24, that may take up space but when the studio owner opens your resume they will see through this and the net result would be just as bad as having a half filled resume.  Similarly, you don’t want to hurt a studio owner’s eyes by having them read a 5 or 6 font if you are trying to make your resume shorter.  On that same note, if the margins are so large that you only have a few words per line, the studio can see through this trick, too.  So only do this in moderation.

Now, if you change the margin and font slightly and that doesn’t do the trick then go through each category with these tips:

Objective:

Looking to make resume shorter: Get rid of this entire section if you need to cut down on space.

Looking to make resume longer: You could perhaps go into more detail about the styles of dance you’d like to teach or your preferred age of students.

Education/Training:

Looking to make resume shorter: If you listed education & training separately, put them together.  Also, if you list both a dance degree & training, consider condensing the amount of training you list since the dance degree alone can prove to a studio that you have proper dance training.

Looking to make resume longer: If you can, separate the education and training to 2 categories.  Also, try to think more about dance classes you’ve taken and perhaps list dance instructors you’ve taken from.  For example, you could list “Took Ballet Master Classes from” and then name drop instructors, do the same for contemporary, etc.  Don’t of course lie about this though; only list this if you actually did take the class.  Also, check out local studios’ schedules and see if they have any classes or master classes you can take so you can keep adding to your resume if your resume is short on content.

Awards:

Looking to make resume shorter: If you have too many dance awards, then just list the ones you most recently won or are the most impressive.  You could also group similar awards together (For example, mention “Won Miss, Teen & Petite Dance of America” rather than list them as 3 separate bullet points).

Looking to make resume longer: If you are lacking awards you could include non-dance awards you’ve received that are somewhat related; for example, if you won a Perfect Attendance award at another job this is a character trait that any job would want, but if you won a pie eating contest a local fair, while interesting, that wouldn’t really matter to a studio owner.

Work Experience:

Looking to make resume shorter: Take off descriptions of jobs that do not relate, such as insurance salesman/waitress/bank teller/financial analyst, etc., and if need be, get rid of jobs altogether that do not relate.  If I got a resume of someone with a strong dance background and teaching experience, I would not care very much about their other work experience.

Looking to make resume longer: Add more descriptions of your jobs but again try hard to make sure they are related to your teaching job.  If you can’t think of any more, then go ahead and list skills you learned or tasks you had at other jobs.  This is better than blank space.

Certification:

Looking to make resume shorter: I would not take off any dance certification, because that’s an important aspect of you that makes you more appealing to a studio owner.  I would try to cut space other places.

Looking to make resume longer: If you are certified in anything non-dance related you could add it here to add space.  If the only certifications you have though are non-dance related put this entire category at the bottom of the resume.

Skills:

Looking to make resume shorter: You could consider taking this out if essentially every dance style you have skills teaching is listed above, just be certain it is already listed in case a studio owner is using a “find” feature to see if you have mentioned any particular style they would like to hire you for.

Looking to make resume longer: Go ahead and add back skills like Microsoft Word or Excel (presuming of course you do possess these skills).  Even though those are unrelated skills, it is better than blank space.  Just put skills towards the bottom of the resume because there’s also a chance the studio owner will have stopped reading by this point.

Keep tweaking this until you are up to or down to 1 page.  Once that is the case, proofread over it to make sure you did not omit anything significant in editing your resume or make any incorrect changes.  Once you are certain this is the case, then there you have it; your resume is good to go!

I would recommend you now submit your resume to Dance Teacher Finder.  Dance Teacher Finder is the only website solely dedicated to helping connecting dance studios with dance teachers.  Your resume will be placed in a database that only registered dance studios can access.  Studios can then contact you when they have a teaching position opening or when they need a substitute teacher (which is a great starting point for those wanting a dance teaching position).  You can also apply to jobs there as well.  It is the best place to go for dance teachers looking for dance teaching positions.

Dance Instructors