Dance Teacher Finder

So if you’ve been following my blog entries, then you started with your contact information & objective then categorized your dance teaching credentials.  Now that you’ve figured out how to categorize your skills, it’s time to fine tune your resume.  Keep these things in mind when doing this:

Order

After you’ve put everything in categories, you need to put an order to your categories.  This is where you really need to think: What is it about me that would really appeal to dance studios?  Is it my dance training?  Is it my dance degree?  Is it all my years of dance teaching experience?  Is it all my awards as a choreographer?  Whatever you feel is your unique selling point should go first.

If you are looking for a bit more guidance there, here are a few tips here:

• If you have dance degree, list education first (especially if you had a high GPA), but if you do not but have significant dance teaching experience list that first
• If you have professional certifications along with a dance degree I would list certifications 2^nd. If I had professional certifications along with significant dance teaching experience, I would list the certifications first, then the teaching experience so it’s already in the studio owner’s mind that you really know what you’re doing

Be specific

Don’t just say you’re an award winning competition dance teacher; you need to give proof.  You could for example list the number of overalls, special awards or top adjudicated award your dances have won (I realize that a number of competitions have different titles for the top award, such as a star system Star Power uses, crystal for Showstoppers, etc. so you could list, for example, “Award winning competition teacher: Routines won 17 total top adjudicated award from Showstoppers, Star Power, Headliners and Hall of Fame”.

The best proof you can give are numbers, and list them as numbers, not words, i.e. list 17 instead of seventeen.  The numerical version of numbers jump out to the eye and that can bring the studio owner’s attention to your accomplishments.

Pick a good font

Make sure you have a professional font that is easy to read.   Good fonts would include Times New Roman, Georgia, Sans Serif or Arial.  Make sure you do not use a color for your font that is hard to read, such as yellow.  While the studio owner could reformat your resume, they could just as easily decide you were not worth the hassle and might not read your resume.

Proofread

A lot of us have made mistakes when sending out a bunch of resumes; I know I once listed my objective as getting a job at [insert company name]…only I accidentally listed the wrong company name.  Not exactly the best first impression to give the company.  So read over it and make sure you don’t have any mistakes on your resume.

Now you have the rough draft of your resume.  You are close to being able to post your resume on Dance Teacher Finder but not quite there.  Check back tomorrow for the final step.

Dance Instructors