By Kelly Blackwell

When you are getting serious about landing a teaching job abroad you need to consider how you are going to do it. Are you going to register with a international teaching job fair organiser like Search-Associates? Are you going to register with The International Educator (TIE) and get international teaching job alerts emailed to you daily? Are you going to trawl the internet for vacancies?

Whichever strategy or combination of strategies you choose to implement you will need to write an effective cover letter that sells you as the ideal candidate.

A great cover letter draws the recruiter in and leads them through your information and inspires them to look at your resume. It introduces you, outlines your experience and states why you are the best candidate for their position.

When writing your cover letter keep these suggestions in mind and you will increase the effectiveness of your letter:

Differentiate

While most recruiters are clued up enough to know that you are probably applying to more than just their international school, it is not good practice to make it obvious. When you write your cover letter you should include a sentence or two about why you want to teach at their school. Reasons you may include are; you have experience in the curricula offered, your children have experience in the curricula offered, you like teaching in small (big, single sex, co-ed) schools, or you have heard positive things about the school from other international teachers.

When you are differentiating you letter, address it to the recruiter if you can find their name on the website or from the advertisement and include the name of the school and location. These small, easy to implement ideas are the key to making each recruiter feel special and show them that you are interested in a job at ‘their’ school.

Be Selective and Adjust Accordingly

If you are job hunting as a teaching couple you need to have a couple of cover letters, or have paragraphs that you can cut and paste to make sure it is targeted. As a teaching couple you will ideally want to get a job at a school that has vacancies in your main teaching subjects. However, you may not be so lucky.

Teaching couples should lead with the strongest candidate and emphasise the experience and flexibility of the other teacher. For example, if you are a teaching couple with secondary maths and an elementary generalist you can apply for schools with openings in either of these areas. For an international school with a vacancy in the elementary school you would outline this person’s experience first and then you would discuss the maths teacher’s experience both in maths, in leadership, in extra curricula activities, etc. And vice versa if you find a school that has a maths vacancy.

Often school recruiters will do some ‘creative shuffling’ if they find a teaching couple they think will suit the school especially well.

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Short is Best

Keep your cover letter short; leave it to the other sections of your application pack to detail your education, experience and philosophy. The function of the cover letter is to provide a brief introduction of yourself and enough information to motivate the international school recruiter to read your resume.

If you have heard of the PowerPoint rule of 6 points per slide, 6 words per point then you will find this rule easy to understand and work with:

3-4 paragraphs, 2-3 sentences per paragraph.

If you are submitting your application by email, it needs to be even shorter because we have a lower tolerance for reading on a computer screen.

Here are just three ideas for making your cover letter more effective. Even if you have a cover letter already prepared, dig it out and check that it meets these criteria, you may be surprised at how more likely a recruiter is to read your resume if you follow these suggestions.

About the Author

There Are Over 4000 International Schools Worldwide, Get The Insider Secrets To Landing A Teaching Job Abroad Today! Get your free copy of Kelly’s free report, Escape the RatRace – TeachOverseas available exclusively from TeachOverseas.info

By Kelly Blackwell

Attending a teaching abroad job fair can be a nerve wracking experience, especially if you have not received any responses from the international school recruiters to your pre-fair approaches. Here’s how it really works…

You will be surprised at the number of teaching job interviews you will be invited to attend at an international recruitment job fair. You may be worried because you have sent out your resume to all the recruiters on the job fair organizer’s list of schools that have vacancies in your teaching area and yet you have received no responses, or only automated responses.

Trust me, this is not a problem!

You will probably find that when you arrive for the orientation session and check your mailbox that you have received a number of interview invitations from those very same recruiters that have not sent you a personal response to your initial attempts to make contact.

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One colleague of mine said she received interview invitations from 26 schools at the last job fair she attended. Another reported that she’d spent hours sending out her resume to different international school recruiters and received a very disappointing response pre-job fair; however she also received an astounding number of interview requests at the job fair.

So, what does this mean to you? You will need to be prepared with a mechanism to quickly and easily turn down interview requests because the chances are you will be invited to interview with schools that you have no interest in teaching for.

One way to prepare for this contingency is to prepare ‘thanks but no thanks’ notes ahead of the job fair. You can then fill in the blanks on the refusal letter and either pass it on to the recruiters at the sign up session on the first morning of the fair, put it in the recruiter’s mailbox, or slip it under the door of their hotel room.

When you are preparing your application packs to take with you to the teaching job fair you simply prepare and print some copies of your refusal letter and take them with you to the fair.

A major problem with this plan occurs if you have not prepared enough of the notes, as my colleague experienced when she received interview invitations from 26 schools, of which she was only interested in two! What do you do then? You will have to resort to hand-written notes.

Another option is to take along a pad of Post-It notes. Post-It notes can be stuck to hotel room doors or on to the recruiter’s table at the sign-up session. A bonus to using this method is that your note will not be accidentally mixed in among other papers because it is both sticky and colourful.

Before you turn down interview requests you need to consider how much practice you have had recently with job interviews. Do you feel confident? Going to job interviews with schools you are not very interested in teaching for will give you an opportunity to practise rusty interview technique in preparation for the schools you really are interested in. Additionally, through interviewing with these recruiters you may discover that an international school you were not very interested in is actually the perfect place for you to move to.

About the Author

Kelly has been teaching abroad for 12 years now, and has refined her job fair strategies so that she always lands a high-paying, desirable teaching job abroad.

By Kelly Blackwell

Attending an international teaching job fair can be very stressful. Whether it is for your first teaching job overseas or your tenth, international job fairs can play havoc with your nerves. This stress can affect your ability to show your best side to recruiters, so eliminating it is a priority. One sure fire way to reduce or even remove the stress you feel is to have a backup plan.

Your backup plan can take many guises. Here are two that I have used successfully in the past to make attending overseas teaching recruitment events more bearable:

1. Plan to attend more than one overseas recruiting fair

There are more than ten job fairs each year that are dedicated to international school teacher recruitment, and you can apply to attend more than one per year. You can even attend more than one organized by the same recruiting agency.

Not every international school attends each fair. You can meet directors from many different international schools if you go to more than one job fair. One way to ensure that you get maximum exposure to recruiters is to apply to attend more than one fair.

The different job fair organizers; Search Associates, CIS and ISS have different schools recruiting with them, so mixing up your job fair registration and attending more than one job fair can increase your chances of finding the perfect overseas teaching position for you.

Many of the job fair organizers offer job fairs in the same locations back to back, so you can fly into Bangkok or London for example and attend two job fairs organized by two agencies in a single trip. Full details of the dates and locations of the job fairs organized by the three big organizers are available in The Complete Guide to Securing a Job at an International School.

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2. Know what your next move will be if you do not get offered an international teaching contract this academic year.

When I attended my first international teaching job fair I had two backup plans in the unlikely event that none of the school directors offered me a contract. I did not have to implement either of them, which is a shame in some ways, because my backup plans were almost as exciting as teaching abroad in an international school!

Here are some backup plans you may wish to explore…

> taking a year out and travelling around the world – you can find places you would like to live along the way and begin relationships with recruiters by visiting them at their schools.

> volunteering with an organization that teaches refugees or works with local teachers to improve methodology and pedagogy – this is an excellent way to gain international experience which will make you more attractive to international school recruiters.

> signing up with the Teachers on the Move, a company that finds temporary teachers for international schools to cover for maternity or long term sickness positions.

> applying for a teacher exchange program such as the JET program that places teachers in Japanese public schools, or the VIF program which places overseas trained teachers in American public schools.

Once you have made your decision to attend a job fair and received your invitation, you need to prepare for an intense two days in a pressure-cooker environment. Careful planning prior to the event and conscious networking at the event are the keys to landing a great teaching job abroad.

About the Author

There Are Over 4000 International Schools Worldwide, Get The Insider Secrets To Landing A Teaching Job Abroad Today! Get your free copy of Kelly’s free report, “Escape the RatRace – TeachOverseas” available exclusively from TeachOverseas.info