How to Highlight TAPIF on Your Resume
Congratulations on successfully completing the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF)! If you’re like Jalen and I, you’re eager to put your new capacities to work in either an academic or professional setting. Read on to learn how to showcase your abilities as a TAPIF alumnus on your resume.
Tailoring your Resume
On your resume, it’s important to frame your TAPIF experience in accordance with your goals. While it’s true that you may have an easier time incorporating TAPIF if you’re planning to become an English teacher than if you want to work in or study other sectors, we believe that with careful composition, listing your TAPIF participation can enhance any resume.
If you are looking to become a teacher after TAPIF, you can describe your directly applicable abilities on you resume, like lesson planning, working with students, and classroom management.
If you aren’t going into teaching, or teaching-specific skills aren’t helpful to list on your resume, include the competencies you gained or developed during TAPIF that will also assist you in non-teaching positions, like leadership, collaboration with coworkers, and conflict resolution.
Including Specifics
TAPIF isn’t just any job – it’s a multifaceted, demanding, and unique opportunity. It’s crucial to express this on your resume! You’d be doing yourself a disservice to describe your assistantship as any old teaching position.
Include specifics about your location in France, the ages and grades of your students, whether you helped them prepare for their brevet (middle school final exam) or their baccalauréat (high school final exam), the types of lessons you provided, how you collaborated with your coworkers, and other details that will describe the particularities of your work.
French-Language Abilities
Even though your work as a TAPIF assistant is mostly conducted in English, TAPIFers certainly use, and even improve, their French skills as a result of participating. Think about your time with TAPIF as a whole – you accomplished so much more than just teaching English to students! You navigated opening a bank account, finding housing, getting an OFII check-up, using public transit, befriending coworkers, and more, all in French.
Be sure to add or update your language skills on your resume. You can list the results of any tests you may have taken, your level of proficiency according to the CEFR scale, and even describe your new ability to use French in the workplace.
Outlining your Skills
TAPIF develops both hard skills, or measurable abilities, and soft skills, or character traits. Listing the skills you learned or enhanced as an assistant is one of the best ways to quantify the value of your TAPIF experience. Here are some examples for you to include:
Hard Skills
– Lesson & Activity Planning
– Management of Group Dynamics
– Provision of Small-Group Tutorials
– Informal Assessment of Student Learning
– Public Speaking
– Proficient in LibreOffice
Soft Skills
– Effective Cross-Cultural Communication
– Flexibility
– Multitasking
– Organizational Skills
– Independence
– Creativity
Using the Right Words
Like with resume writing in general, choosing your words wisely when describing your work with TAPIF makes all the difference. In addition to using correct grammar, employing specialized, active verbs that detail what you accomplished will communicate to schools or employers the ways in which being an assistant with TAPIF makes you a desirable candidate. Instead of just saying, “I taught English to French students,” try incorporating phrases like the following:
– Developed students’ English communication skills…
– Created engaging activities and lessons…
– Collaborated with the English Department…
– Facilitated group discussion…
– Cultivated a positive classroom environment…
Final Thoughts
Though we’ve been using the word “resume,” which is the most common application document in the United States, you can use our advice when making a CV, writing cover letters, updating your LinkedIn, applying to jobs via job-searching sites, and even discussing your experience during interviews. All in all, we believe that TAPIF is a valuable experience that professionally develops all participants – show your potential employers or admissions officers that this is the case by using our tips!
If you have any questions or want to know more, make sure to leave us a comment!
Check out our video to prepare to participate in TAPIF!
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