Tour Guide Resume Example

Picture this: you wake up in the morning, throw on your company uniform and start the day in an ultimate travel destination. You answer tourist questions about the locations and their history and get to experience something new every day. That's the life of a tour guide.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, tour guide jobs are at a 2.9% growth rate with 38,030 jobs currently available.

As a tour guide, you can get a job in the following industries:

• Museums, Historical Sites, and Similar Institutions
• Travel Arrangement and Reservation Services
• Amusement and Recreation Industries
• Local Government
• Scenic and Sightseeing Transporation

Moreover, the top 5 states with the highest tour guide employment are:

1. California
2. Florida
3. New York
4. Texas
5. Virginia

In order to land your dream tour guide job, it is important to have a clean, impressive, and detailed resume.

In this article, we will be discussing the following 7 steps to get your resume ready for new sights and experiences as a tour guide:

1. Formatting your tour guide resume
2. Writing an impressive resume summary
3. Listing your work experience and what to do if you have none
4. Including key skills in your resume
5. Adding languages to your resume
6. Adding certifications to your resume
7. Listing your education in your resume

1. Format your tour guide resume

Did you know there are multiple ways to format your resume? From including headshots to having a progress bar next to your key skills, there are many ways that you can format your resume.

As a tour guide, you want hiring managers to focus on your experience, certifications, and what you can provide guests, tourists, or other individuals you may be interacting with on a daily basis.

Here are three ways to format your tour guide resume:

1. Reverse-chronological, which emphasizes your previous work experience
2. Functional, which highlights your key skills
3. Hybrid, which combines the previous formats to give hiring managers a closer look at what you're bringing to the table

While the choice is yours, formatting your resume in a hybrid-style format is often the best way to show hiring managers who you are and what you've done without making your resume too lengthy.

If you'd like, you can even include a profile photo to show hiring managers your appearance. For some tour guides jobs, like working for the Walt Disney Company, there are certain characteristics employees, or Cast Members, must meet, such as no visible tattoos.

Tip: Since hiring managers are receiving a plethora of resumes and applications for their job listings, it's crucial to make your resume stand out. Make sure to look over the posted job description and implement some of the details and keywords listed into your resume.

Take a look at our guide on how to format your resume if you want to learn more.

2. Write an impressive resume summary

A resume summary is a 1-2 sentence blurb that summarizes everything your resume consists of. It's a quick and easy way to show hiring managers that you appreciate their time, which can help your resume stand out from the pile since not everyone writes one. You can also think of it as your elevator pitch.

Sometimes, it's difficult to summarize yourself in 1-2 sentences, but here are some elements you should always include in your resume summary:

• Years of experience
• What industry or industries you've tour guided for
• Some personal characters

Tip: Sometimes, it's easier to write your resume summary after you have already written your resume. That way, it's easier to pick and choose what characteristics to include.

If you're still stuck on how to write your resume summary, here's a good and simple example:

Energetic and knowledgeable tour guide with 5 years of practice helping people travel in unfamiliar locations with the ability to create memorable experiences.

You'll notice here that the word practice is used instead of experience to avoid word redundancy. This resume summary also shows hiring managers a little bit more about the candidate's personality with the use of of energetic and knowledgeable.

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Here's what your resume summary should not look like:

Tour guide with experience showing students around campus.

While this example may seem straight to the point, it doesn't give hiring managers an opportunity to be interested in going through your resume in depth.

Want to write the perfect resume summary? Our guide on writing resume summaries has tons of examples.

3. List your work experience and what to do if you have none

A tour guide position is no easy feat. You have to accommodate tons of strangers and have a lot of knowledge of the location or history you are presenting. Therefore, having prior experience may be what helps you to get that tour guide job on an ultimate vacation destination location. If you have none, don't worry. We'll get to that, too.

When listing your work experience, it's important to highlight the specifics you did on the job, and do so using good verbs.

Here are some examples of job descriptions you may be able to include in your tour guide resume:

• Greeted all guests promptly at scheduled tour times.
• Determined if any guests have physical restrictions that should be considered.
• Clearly and articulately provided information to guests in an engaging manner..
• Answered any questions that the guests have.
• Demonstrated extensive knowledge of our facility and related topics.
• Escorted guests through the tour, taking breaks as needed.

When you get into more specific tour guide jobs, you can include job descriptions like these:

• Provided educational and enthusiastic narrations to large groups on the Bronx Zoo Monorail.
• Provided excellent service to guests, including maintaining general knowledge of park attractions and amenities, answering questions, and finding ways to create a great guest experience, in accordance with the standards of guest service.
• Helped guests enter and exit Monorail with special attention to children, elderly, and disabled patrons.
• Maintained order among guests waiting to enter ride and safely admitting the appropriate number of guests in a timely manner.
• Monitored area and communicating with guests to ensure their safety.

Tip: Show the work experience that is relevant to the job. Do not include your work experience from working at an ice parlor or a retail store as it does not apply to this position.

Want more tips and tricks on how to write your work experience description? Check out our guide on describing your work experience.

What to do if you have no work experience

If you don't have any work experience, don't sweat it. This won't be the case forever.

If your interest in tour guiding began while you were in high school or college and you were doing guided tours of the school to prospective students, even if you weren't getting paid, you can include this as your work experience.

Here's what the description for a student tour guide position may look like:

• Conducted tours to prospective students.
• Helped answer questions at the tours and welcome desk.
• Assisted in the recruitment of prospective students.

If you want to be a tour guide, don't have the experience, and are still in school, consider talking to the school's administration and becoming a student guide. It's a win-win for everyone.

You can also check out our guide on how to write a resume with no work experience for more information.

4. Include key skills in your resume

As a tour guide, there are many key skills that will benefit your resume and help you land the job. Listing impressive and relevant skills gives hiring managers more reasons to hire you.

Here are some examples of key skills you can include in your resume as a tour guide:

• Communication
• Guided Tour Planning
• Time Management
• Creative Problem Solving
• Advanced Planning
• Project Management
• Travel Knowledge
• Multitasking
• Organization
• Adaptability

The job of tour guiding is extremely social. Showing hiring managers that you've got great communication skills may help you get an interview faster. The same goes for travel knowledge, adaptability, and planning.
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Tip: You can even include skills such as multilingual and CPR certified to impress hiring managers.

Having trouble identifying your skills? We have a guide with 100+ key skills you can include in your resume.

5. Add a language section to your resume

As we just mentioned, knowing multiple languages may be a skill that separates you from the rest of the competition and helps you get hired more quickly.

Working as a tour guide, you're bound to meet people that do not speak the local language. Therefore, it is important to add to your resume a language section that shows hiring managers that you are bilingual or multilingual.

Here are some languages you can include on your resume if you know them:

• English
• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• German
• Russian
• Chinese
• Japanese
• Romanian

Tip: Next to the languages you know on your resume, add if you're fluent, intermediate or a beginner in the language to show hiring managers just how well you know the specific language.

6. Add certifications to your resume

Working with people, it may happen that someone faints on a tour or needs first aid. Being First Aid certified could bring your chances of getting the job higher, especially if you put that certification on your resume.

Certifications as a tour guide show hiring managers that, if an urgent situation were to happen with a guest or tourist in your group, you have the certifications and knowledge of how to address the situation and help the guest or tourist in need.

Here are certifications that you should consider getting and adding to your resume:

• CPR Certified
• First Aid Certified
• AED Instructor Certified

Tip: AED Instructor Certified means you are certified to work with an automated external defibrillator. These are used to help individuals who are undergoing cardiac arrest, which can happen on the job.

If you're looking for more certifications to include in your resume or want to know how to correctly list them, check out our guide.

7. List your education on your resume

To become a tour guide, you, at least, need a high school diploma or an equivalent certificate.

With that being said, it's important to list your education on your resume. Whether you've only finished high school or have gone to college, this shows hiring managers that you at least meet the educational criteria of becoming a tour guide.
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Tip: If you have a Bachelor of Arts in Communication, it lets hiring managers know that you have an understanding of how communication works and how to implement that into your guided tours.

Here's what adding your education to your resume can look like:

Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL

Bachelor of Arts in Communication (2013 — 2017)

If you did guided tours of your high school, college or university to prospective students and their parents, listing your education shows that you did guided tours at a place you had knowledge of and could really help to answer any questions the students or parents had.

Don't know if to put your GPA on your resume? Take a look at our guide on adding your GPA to your resume, which includes tips and examples.

Key Takeaways

From the looks of it, there may have been more to your tour guide resume than you originally thought, but these tips and tricks are sure to land you the tour guide job of your dreams anywhere in the world.

Here's a summary of everything we've discussed:

1. How to format your tour guide resume
2. How to write an impressive resume summary
3. How to list your work experience and what to do if you have none
4. The importance of including key skills in your resume
5. The importance of adding languages to your resume
6. What adding certifications can do for your resume
7. Why you should list your education in your resume

Following our guide, your resume will be travel-ready for your next tour guide job! Good luck!

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