As a professional CV writer, leadership and career coach is one of two problems I see most often in the CV attempts made by teachers looking to leave the profession and pursue a new career path.
RELEVANCE
Teachers in the UK apply to educational roles through an application form process that includes a personal statement. The application form includes education and work history – no gaps can be left unaccounted for. And aside from references, personal details and safeguarding declarations, there is a nice section about further professional development.
Teachers are highly educated. Teachers attend LOTS of continuous professional development courses, so transferring this onto a CV will almost instantly make it too long!
And this is before you add in work history and the lengthy required personal statement from your application form into CV format!
Given my knowledge and experience of a long career in education, I am not surprised to see teacher CVs running into over double length of standard CVs. The longest I’ve worked on to date ran to 15 pages with a further 8-pages of supplementary information, which I successfully turned into a 2-page standard CV that packed a fantastic punch landing the teacher into a corporate role on the first application!
Problem 1: RELEVANCE
Problem 2: Sounding like a teacher
If this sounds familiar and you are a teacher struggling to write your CV, here is a professional tip to help you streamline your CV to make it more relevant.
For this, I am going to focus attention on professional development (CPD in education). Typically, teachers will have attended:
- Safeguarding training yearly
- Prevent training
- First aid
- Food hygiene
- Curriculum development
- Subject specific
- General curriculum development
- Ofsted
- Subject leadership
- Data analysis / skills gap analysis
- SEND
- ADHD
- Autism
- MLD
- Global delay
- Attention skills
- Biodiversity
- List goes on….
- Mental Health / wellbeing
- Dealing with trauma
- Bullying
- Vulnerable children
- Friendships / positive relationships
- Online wellbeing / safety
- DV
- Behaviour management
- Learning behaviours
- Teaching pedagogy
- Teaching and Learning
- Covid catch up
- Catch up / progression planning / closing the gap
- IT / digital learning / virtual classrooms
- Health and Safety in the workplace
- And so much more….
By no means an exhaustive list, these are common training events that teachers will have attended or are likely to attend in the 5 x inset days per academic year.
Start by listing everything, that is fine.
But now think about the role you are applying for in the corporate role… and ask yourself,
IS IT RELEVANT.
Example 1 – Applying for Curriculum Development role
Curriculum Development related CPD is relevant, a few of the teaching and learning may be, but unless you are still teaching (you won’t be or you’d be completing an application form, not a CV) then there will be many things in the list not relevant to the new role, e.g. Covid catch up, food hygiene, behavior management, etc.
Example 2 – Applying for a Virtual Assistant role
Most of the list has no relevance at all. Unless it links to IT, planning or analysis, leave it out. If you can demonstrate the VA skills elsewhere in your CV, don’t even bother creating this section!
Almost anyone can write a CV.
Can you write a high-quality CV that will get you shortlisted?
The only way you will know is by applying and waiting to see if you get shortlisted (or not).
If you don’t want to have the stress, I specialize in writing professional CVs for teachers and school leaders.
Contact me to book services after seeing what is on offer below.
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