Making Your Teaching Resume Count: Basics for a Brilliant CV

As you’ve no doubt discovered since graduating, teaching is highly fulfilling, but it does require energy and commitment. And that’s not limited to the classroom. If you’re looking for your dream job, make the effort to create a teacher resume that showcases your skills and experience, and critically, catches a school’s eye.

From structure to style, here’s how to make your education CV stand out.    

PERSONAL SUMMARY

The key to a great resume is a well-written and eye-catching personal summary. After placing your name, contact details and (optionally) a small headshot at the top, move into your summary. A personal summary needs to outline in a few lines the skills, experience, passions and qualities that make you an ideal candidate. There’s a lot of competition for education jobs, so make sure it’s clear, focused and sums up as best you can why you’re ideally suited to the role. This is where you can describe your teaching philosophy, and how you would use your skills and experience to enhance the school.

THE STRUCTURE

After the personal summary, move onto the main body of your resume. This should include:

• Work history – order with your most recent position first, include dates for each role and add a short summary of achievements. Be sure to include year levels so it’s very clear to recruiters what experience you have.
• Education – again, start with the most recent first. In addition to your teaching degree, you might include any additional courses you’ve taken since starting that are relevant to the role.
• Interests – this is not essential but useful if you have limited teaching experience. When deciding whether to include an interest, consider if it showcases passions or skills that would be useful to a teaching role.

REFEREES

Include at least two professional referees that ideally are principals or deputy-principals. If you are new to the workforce, you might include a personal referee to vouch that you are hardworking, reliable and dedicated but this also needs to be someone senior and do make it clear it is a personal and not professional reference.

STYLE AND DESIGN

While style matters, when it comes to your education CV, basic is best. Forget fancy fonts and borders. Select a simple font and use bold headings so the structure is clear. Plenty of white space is going to help create a look that’s clean, uncluttered and professional. Your resume needs to be well-written (check and double-check grammar) and ideally no more than two A4 pages in length.

LANDING YOUR NEW JOB

Once your resume is done, the next step is to find your new education job. We are experts in the education field and we understand schools – and teachers. If you’ve seen a job on our site you’d like to apply for, or simply want further details about how we work, get in touch. We love seeing teachers find their dream education role.