“A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.”
~ Nelson Mandela

What should be on your CV if you are looking for a teaching position?

—

by

Alison Papenfus

The Importance of your CV
You want a job? First you need an interview. How do you get an interview? Someone sees your CV and likes it. Simple as that. If you are a job seeker, your CV has one task. To get you an interview. But. If you get the job your CV doesn’t get thrown away, so we need to make sure that after the interview your CV still serves your best interests.

Your CV is a legal document under South African law. That means that if there are any mistakes or inaccuracies in your CV the entire document is invalid. If you have been hired on the basis of your CV and your employer later finds the CV was misleading, you can be summarily dismissed. The upshot of this is that every job-seeker should check and recheck everything on their CV before they send it to anyone.

When you are writing your CV, ask yourself what skills and attributes do you have that would make an employer want to offer you an interview? If he wants someone who lives close to the school he will want your address. He will want to know if you will be at school on time – put in the drivers’ license and own transport. If he wants someone for a specific grade he will need to know what grades you have taught previously, if the job requires a particular qualification he will want to know what qualifications you have. Think like an employer as you design your CV. What might that employer want to know about you? Then make sure that anything and everything is on the CV!

Most employers who receive your CV will never have met you. So, the first impression your CV makes on them generates the picture they create of you in their mind. If the grammar is messy, the spelling suspect and the layout chaotic – that’s what they will think of you, messy, shifty and chaotic, no one wants to employ a teacher with these characteristics. So, make sure you obey all the rules of grammar you were taught at school – and then some! Your CV is no place for off-beat layout or creative language use! Always assume the employer is conservative and inclined to nit-pick, because your CV is likely to be one of at least a dozen she looks at for one vacancy. And also assume that their eyesight ain’t perfect – use a 12 font!

So now, while you are taking another look at that CV of yours, be brave, and blow your own trumpet a bit. If you are an academic whizz with a string of distinctions from Matric through University – say so! If you won “best teacher” prizes don’t keep us in the dark! If you are a Springbok Waterpolo Referee or played first team Korfball we’d like to know! You never know what skill might be the one which secures the interview! Put it all down! Principals will “skim” through details that are not relevant to them, and then suddenly spot the ONE vital thing that gets you the interview.

The purpose of your CV is to get you that interview. So, make sure that you look and sound like “the ONE” that they want to see!

1. The Sections of your CV and what they should contain

When you are writing a CV, less is not more. Less is not even enough. I know there are people around who tell you that you can leave out your marital status and your residential address, and half a dozen other things. Don’t believe them. If you leave “stuff” out, you will probably omit the one thing that might have got you the interview.
Section 1: Personal Details
  • Your full name, maiden name for married ladies and any other name by which a past employer might remember you
  • SA ID or Permanent Residence Certificate Number
  • SACE registration
  • Date of last Police Clearance
  • Residential Address
  • If you are relocating – where exactly are you relocating to, when and why. Never say “I will go anywhere …” because it makes you sound desperate. Be specific about where you want to teach.
  • Phone Number and Whatsapp number if it is different from the phone
  • Email address
  • Marital status and dependents under 18 years
  • A recent head and shoulders photo of yourself on the first page is not a bad idea, but it’s only a must-have if you want to teach overseas.
Section 2: Your Education
  • Name of the school where you wrote matric, dates at the school, matric subjects, any distinctions, extra-murals you participated in, were you in any school teams, drama productions, what offices did you hold, were you elected or appointed, any prizes you won at school.
  • The employer is probably looking for potential leadership in the school context so make sure you speak up about your school record!
  • Names and dates for each university you studied at.
  • Course studied, degrees and diplomas awarded, any distinctions, participation in campus life, offices held, leadership positions, community involvement, sports teams.
  • The employer is looking for academic excellence, leadership and the ability to stick to activities and not give up!
  • Teaching Pracs; Where, when, what you did. But once you have completed a year’s full time teaching you can leave this out.
  • Short Courses; the name of the course, the provider of the course, length of the course and date you completed it.
  • Ongoing activities : eg sports, Art exhibitions, Music, church/mosque/synagogue/temple; give details of what you did during the university years and how this has continued since. Give the dates for everything.
  • Could stating your religion put you at a disadvantage? With fundamentalist schools, yes probably, but most people don’t want to teach there anyway. Most South African schools value diversity, so if any activity is important to you, put it in.
Section 3: Your past and present Employment
Start with your earliest employment – if you were a waitress while you were at High School please say so. If you worked part time while studying at University, drop it in. The employer is looking for an energetic go-getter with good people skills not a blob who hid themselves away and allowed someone else to pay all the bills while they studied and didn’t get any distinctions.
For every employer we need:
  • Name of the School/Company,
  • dates (including the month) you were employed and date you left,
  • main duties, exact subjects and grades you taught, extra murals,
  • any offices you held, prizes you won, teams you coached, events you organized, and
  • reason for leaving (or wanting to leave)
  • We don’t need self-assessment “I am a dedicated hardworking teacher who …” does not impress anyone! And under duties you don’t need to tell us that you had to “prepare lessons and control learners books” It’s part of the job! Think! Your CV needs to reflect what makes you unique (and highly employable!), talk about that!
If you were unemployed or on maternity / paternity leave for a while, if you were unwell or injured you need to say so and not just leave a gap in the employment record. When a CV has gaps in the employment record the assumption is that you were engaged in something inappropriate. No gaps. Be honest – otherwise you could get sacked later for not telling the truth.
And now we come to THE MOST IMPORTANT section of your CV. If you get this wrong you are likely to be unemployed for a long, long time!
Section 4: Referees
Few things annoy me more on a CV than the statement “Referees available on request.” I immediately wonder what the person has to hide that they don’t want to give referees? This supercilious statement will cause plenty of employers to chuck the CV in the bin. If you are an honest hard-working teacher, you should have no problem giving the head of your last school as a referee.
Employers believe that past performance is the best predictor of future performance. So, they will want to speak to people you previously worked for before they offer you an interview. Select your referees carefully, in any workplace there are always some people you will get on with better than others!
Referees must be recent past or current employers (no one from more than five years ago) State the name of the referee, designation (e.g. Head of school), capacity in which they supervised your work and their daytime land line phone number – no cellphones for referees, a cellphone could belong to someone in Johannesburg Central Prison for all we know.
If there is some reason why you cannot give the head of the school as a referee, you need to explain that reason. Yes, I know some heads are unfriendly when teachers want to leave, but actually not many. If you are still working at the school, I might accept a Deputy, but I won’t accept a colleague, HOD or member of your family, no matter how well connected they are. And if you have left a school, I really do expect to be free to speak to the head of school unless you give me a valid reason not to.
If you have written references, by all means attach them! But know that we will phone the school to check! If your past school did not have a land line phone please accept my sympathy, but if I cannot check references on a land line, I will not have much confidence in what is said to me by the referee.

2. Warnings!

Your CV should be a fully editable PDF document or an MS Word file. Please don’t use some strange template – because when we open the CV it could be jumbled and poorly presented.
Don’t use CAPS in your CV, in the digital age this is considered to be shouting at the person who reads it, and it doesn’t go down well!
Be aware that, while Placements in Education will only check the referees you give us, heads of schools know one another and may well talk about you! Please let your current head know that you are looking around before you send out your CV! Otherwise, when she gets a call from another head who wants to hire you, she may not say what you would like her to say!

Finally, you need to know that there are hundreds of job-seekers with teaching qualifications out there. Employers have become extremely fussy about the standard of the CV, yours has to be in the top five if you want that interview. Over 75% of all CVs an employer receives go straight into the bin. If you want your CV to stand out – make sure you take all the advice we have offered here, spend some time on the document, check the spelling and the grammar and then ask someone to proof read it for you before you send it out. If that sounds too much like hard work to you, it’s possible that a career in teaching is not a good fit for you! Teaching is excruciatingly hard work, and your CV is the first step towards the prize of your own classroom!

Happy Job Hunting!