Adapting your CV to apply for a TEFL job

Tammy Osbourne's CV was an excellent one - but it was heading straight for the Director of Studies' wastepaper basket.

Tammy had brought her original CV with her from home in Florida when she came to do the CELTA course. She had extensive experience in restaurant management but was now up against the problem facing most trainees at the end of her course: she passed the course (with a good 'B') but had no teaching experience to put on her resume.

Catch-22: No experience, no job...

It's Catch-22 for quite a number of trainees: with no experience you don't get the job; with no job you don't get the experience. For some, the solution is teaching on summer camps, either locally (in and around Barcelona there are a lot of such teaching jobs available) or in the UK.

For Tammy, however, doing an extensive re-write of her CV made a big difference to the impression her resume was going to make on the DoS sitting in his office.

What changes did Tammy make?

Tammy made a number of changes, some obvious, some less so, to ensure that her new CV got a least more than a cursory glance. Among these she decided to:

• Reduce it from two and a half pages to one, ruthlessly cutting out anything that was not relevant to the sort of position she was now applying for
• Include a mobile phone number on which she could be contacted here in Spain
• Include her new qualification right there at the top, including the (recent) date, (good) grade and (well-known, reputable) centre
• Further down the page, include details of the teaching the CELTA course itself had involved
• Keep her BA in English Education there too, as that was also, surely, relevant
• Slash the amount of information she had on her previous employment and omit things like sales management and volumes
• Retain the fact that her responsibilities included "training and monitoring", creating training manuals and monitoring training activities: she might not have taught much English, but she did have other teaching experience
• Bring back the details of the 9 months she had spent teaching private English lessons, which had been left off her Management CV; it was a long time ago, but was still better than nothing!
• Include experience working with children (something your average DoS likes to see)
• Include references - her CELTA course tutors

Overall effect

What effect is your CV going to have when it lands on the desk of the DoS at the language school you have applied to?

The likely reaction to Tammy's original CV would be "Why on earth is this restaurant manager applying to us? We're an English school!"

The new CV might still produce the reaction "Hm, this person doesn't have a lot of experience," but at least she appears to have some, which is what matters! Essentially, what she has done is cut out anything not relevant to the job she is applying for, and (thus) highlighted the experience she has that is.

A nice clear photograph (which Tammy didn't include), and the DoS might have been reaching for the phone, not the wastepaper bin...