When pursuing teaching positions, your CV is usually the first impression headmasters, principals or HR professionals get of you.
As such, it’s critical that your teaching CV makes a powerful impact and makes you stand out among the competition.
As a teacher, your CV is your greatest marketing tool.
In this guide, which includes three teacher CV samples, we’ll show you how to craft a hard-hitting CV that shows what makes you the best candidate for the job.
This guide is designed to help all teachers, from secondary school teachers, headmasters/headmistresses and university professors to substitute teachers, primary school teachers and pre-school teachers.
As of October 2019, there were over 506,400 full time teachers in the UK, according to the British Educational Suppliers Association. The majority of these teachers are employed as primary school and secondary school teachers.
When we consider the fact that there are over 32,100 schools in the UK, with an average of only 16.4 teachers per school, it’s clear to see that competition for teaching positions in tough.
This is why it’s important to approach the job market with an effective CV.
You might be wondering if you should be preparing a teacher CV or a teacher resume. However, we use the term interchangeably and see no distinction between the two.
Whether you use the term CV or resume, the document has the same purpose: to articulate your experiences and skills in the most effective manner and make a strong impact on the reader.
Like CVs for all profession, teacher CVs should include your contact details in an easy to read manner. Contact details are usually positioned at the top of CVs, as demonstrated in the teacher’s CV sample in this guide.
Include your contact number, email address and LinkedIn URL if you have one. Ensure to add your location too. There is no need to include your full address; simply state your town/city and country.
Teachers’ CVs should include a powerful professional profile – a short introduction to your CV – that illustrates your expertise and experiences in teaching while showing what makes you unique.
How do you make your professional profile unique?
The key to writing a unique professional profile is to tailor it to job you are applying for. Study the job posting for the teaching position and tailor your professional profile in line with the essential requirements.
Additionally, it's important to craft a professional profile that touches on your unique value proposition. Your unique value proposition is the key, unique benefit that you bring to the table.
For example, have you got a reputation for generating excellent GCSE grades? Do you utilise a novel approach to teaching that gets fantastic results?
Identify your unique value proposition and ensure it comes across in your professional profile.
Here is an example of a teacher’s professional profile:
I am an enthusiastic secondary school history teacher with high aspirations for students, committed to supporting growth in children and enabling them to realise their learning objectives. An agent for positive change, I believe that researching the past is vital in understand the present. This is why I take pleasure from encouraging students to throw themselves into history and learn the valuable lessons of our past.
My love for teaching is demonstrated in my students’ exam results; for the last five years, an average of 84% of my GCSE history students have achieved grades B or higher.
The best teaching CVs articulate teachers' relevant job skills in an effective, easy-to-follow manner.
Include a concise, professionally formatted skills section to draw attention to your capabilities. In this section, focus only on your hard skills.
When it comes to soft skills, you should always try to show, rather than tell. As soft skills don’t hold much weight unless they’re backed up with examples of times you’ve utilised them, it’s much more effective to demonstrate them in your career summary.
This way, you can provide tangible evidence of times you have used the skills to achieve positive results.
As a teacher, you’ll be well aware of the importance of patience. All teachers encounter students who lack respect and cause disruptions in lessons.
To cope with this, teachers need to have an abundance of patience and very thick skin.
To show that you have a patient character, touch on your conflict management experience and demonstrate times that you’ve maintained your composure in pressurised situations.
Teaching is largely about communicating ideas to students. Teachers who are able to communicate effectively with their students tend to get better results.
Whether it’s verbal, non-verbal or written communication, your teacher CV should highlight your ability to optimise the learning process through strong communication.
To show your communication acumen on your CV, illustrate your own unique approach to engaging with students.
For example, do you smile at students and maintain a kind demeanour? Do you converse with students on individual basis because you find it helps them to understand?
By showing your ability to communicate effectively with pupils, your CV will be more effective.
Teachers must balance multiple tasks alongside the actual process of teaching. This may include marking, planning lessons or overseeing disciplinary processes; there’s always plenty of work for teachers to do.
As such, teachers must be able to organise their time effectively.
To show your organisation skills on your CV, demonstrate your experience managing multiple tasks simultaneously. Show your time management skills and planning skills.
Did you arrange after school clubs? Did you establish new support groups for students? If so, draw attention to this to illustrate your organisation skills.
Furthermore, prepare your CV in a well-organised, professionally formatted manner. Such CVs demonstrate a highly organised candidate with good attention-to-detail.
While many teachers don’t have managerial responsibilities, they are leaders of their classroom and they’re responsible for the success of their students.
The best teachers are great leaders.
How do you show leadership skills on your teacher CV?
The key to showing leadership skills on your CV is to highlight your successes.
Great leaders get results.
There is no more effective way to showcase your leadership qualities than to draw attention to your successes as a leader.
For example, did you reduce cases of misbehaviour in your classroom? Did you introduce a new teaching strategy that contributed to improved student performance?
These kinds of accomplishments indicate a teacher with sound leadership skills.
As with most professions, those who are enthusiastic about their job tend to perform to higher standards. Teachers’ enthusiasm rubs off on their students, which in turn improves the quality of their learning experience.
For this reason, enthusiasm is a key skill for teachers.
This doesn’t mean that teachers should be hyperactive in lessons, jumping up and down in front of the blackboard.
They simply need to be passionate about their job.
To show your enthusiasm on your CV, highlight what drew you to a career in teaching and why you love your job.
Take a look at the teaching CV examples in this guide; notice that the history teacher touches on her passion for history in regards to learning lessons from the past. This shows that she is passionate about her subject.
Add your work experience, starting with your most recent role. Include the job title, school name, location and dates of employment.
Then articulate your duties and achievements in a concise manner. Try to quantify your achievements, using numbers to bolster them and make a stronger impact.
Here is an example: ‘Increased the number of Year 10s securing A*-C grades at GCSE by 24%’.
Note that the use of numbers makes the achievement more ‘real’ and offers evidence of the teacher’s success.
Teacher CVs often include more sections than CVs for other professions. These sections include memberships, awards and honours, publications and conferences attended.
If you’re a member of professional associations, such as the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development or the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), include a memberships/associations section on your CV.
Have you attended conferences or delivered presentations that are relevant to teaching? If so, include a conferences section to highlight them.
Add the name of the conference and the dates attended.
Many academic CVs include a list of the teacher or professor’s publications. Include any publications in an easy-to-read format, starting with the title of the publication, the name of the journal or organisation and the dates of publication.
If you’ve been presented with any awards or honours that are related to teaching and academia, include a section to showcase them.
In the final section of your CV, highlight any relevant additional information. This may include languages, clearances, licences, voluntary activities and IT proficiency.
Nowadays, CVs need to be optimised for recruitment screening software, such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). These systems filter and rank candidates’ CVs to provide recruiters with the most relevant candidates.
To ensure your CV beats these bots, you’ll have to optimise it through keywords insertion and professional formatting.
Education planning, classroom management, education programmes, teaching strategies, career development, course design, curriculum development, behaviour management, learning strategies, student counselling, special needs education, high school teaching, primary school teaching, lesson planning, course management.
To optimise your CV further for ATS, ensure your CV is well-formatted and easy-to-follow.
Don’t include photos, graphics or tables on your CV. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) can’t read these and including them could have a negative impact on your CV.
Use the reverse chronological CV format. This format involves including your work experience in reverse chronological order, starting with your most recent teaching position.
To see what reverse chronological CVs look like, take a look at the teaching CV samples in this guide.
When preparing your CV, select adequate margin sizes. To ensure your CV is professional in appearance, you don’t want your margins to be too wide or too narrow.
The ideal margin sizes on all sides are between 1.7 cm (0.66”) and 2.2 cm (0.86”).
Separate your CV’s sections with professional borders. This makes your CV easier to follow.
To add borders to your CV in Microsoft Word, navigate to the top of the document and click ‘Design’. Select ‘Page Borders’ and choose the type of border you would like to use on your CV. Then highlight the text where you would like to add the border beneath. Click ‘Borders’, which you will find next to the shading tab, and then select ‘Bottom Border’.
Breaking up text is important to optimise the reading experience of your CV and make the key information easy to locate.
One of the best ways to break up text is to add line spacing between blocks of text.
To add line spacing to your CV, highlight the text you would like to add space above or beneath, click ‘Layout’, and then choose the amount of space you would like to add (we usually recommend around 6 pt. of spacing).
Use common, trusty sans or sans serif fonts, such as Calibri, Arial, Tahoma and Times New Roman.
Avoid overly creative fonts, which will be sure to make your CV unprofessional in appearance.
Have you found this teacher CV writing guide helpful? We hope so.
If you would like us to prepare your new CV for you, feel free to make use of our professional CV writing services.
