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imgApplication Skills

Full Breakdown: How to Design Your Resume

Your resume is usually the very first thing a school sees — often before your self-introduction video, before any interview. A hiring coordinator may spend under thirty seconds deciding whether to keep reading, so clean structure and clarity matter just as much as the substance of your experience.

Listen to this guide

Application Skills
How to Design Your Resume
0:00 / 19:57

Watch: How to Design a Resume That Gets You Shortlisted

A short tutorial covering structure, content, and how to use Canva to build it. Seeing the layout built step by step makes it much easier to replicate than trying to work it out from a written list alone. Watch this before you start building your own.

Watch: Sample Resumes Worth Looking At

Looking at a few strong examples helps you see what “clean and professional” actually looks like in practice — not just in theory.

Video coming soon
  • How much white space they leave (a cluttered resume feels overwhelming at a glance)
  • How they organise sections so the most important information is easy to find
  • How consistent the formatting is — fonts, spacing, bullet style
  • How they handle a professional photo, if one is included

What Your Resume Should Include

  • Contact details and a short professional summary (2-3 sentences on who you are and what you're looking for)
  • Teaching qualifications — degree, TEFL/TESOL certificate, and hours completed
  • Teaching experience, most recent first, in short bullet points rather than paragraphs
  • Relevant skills — classroom management, lesson planning, technology comfort
  • Education and any additional certifications
  • A professional photo, where expected — a clean, friendly headshot is a safe default for teaching roles abroad

Tools Worth Using

Canva

FREE PLAN

The best starting point — its free plan includes a wide range of fully customisable resume templates, no design experience required.

Novoresume & Zety

FREE TIER

Resume builders with free tiers that guide you section by section.

Google Docs & Microsoft Word

FREE

Free built-in resume templates, professional if kept clean and simple.

Europass CV

EU-SPECIFIC

A standardised format widely expected by employers and institutions across Europe.

Do's & Don'ts

DO
DON'T
Keep it to one, or at most two, pages — nobody's reading a five-page resume for a teaching role
Don't cram everything in — cutting content is better than shrinking the font to fit
Use a clean, readable font and consistent spacing throughout
Don't mix formatting styles — inconsistent fonts, sizes, or bullet styles look unpolished fast
Stay consistent with verb tense — past roles in past tense, current role in present tense
Don't write in full paragraphs for your experience section — it's harder to skim
Lead with a short professional summary so your intent is clear at a glance
Don't leave out your TEFL hours or certificate type — schools want that detail specifically
Use short bullet points for experience, not dense paragraphs
Don't send a Word document as your final version — formatting can break on the recipient's device
Include a professional photo where it's expected for the destination you're applying to
Don't use a low-effort casual photo — a simple, well-lit smartphone photo taken seriously reads better than a cropped social media picture
Save your final version as a PDF before sending, so formatting doesn't shift on another device
Don't reuse the exact same resume for every application without checking it still fits what that school is asking for