Cover Letters for International Teaching Couples

Recently Ilja posted a comment on one of my blogposts asking a question about applying for overseas teaching jobs as a teaching couple. Here's the comment:

Hi Kelly,
Thanks for all your information.
A question about teaching couples: when we send our application in, would you recommend we send TWO separate cover letters, or do we combine it into one letter with two resumes attached?
My husband and I are divided on this one so I am very curious about what you think.(Ps, have downloaded your book, it is great!)
Regards,Ilja

I thought I'd answer this question for everyone...

When you are applying to international schools as a teaching couple you send one cover letter to the recruiter - but you may have several versions of your cover letter prepared ready to send.

Even applying as a single teacher I usually have a couple of cover letters prepared because I like to hedge my bets and apply for any position that looks interesting in either of my teaching subjects.

My recommendation for teaching couples is that you prepare at least two cover letters. One should emphasise the teaching qualifications of one member of the couple, and the other will emphasise the other member's. You may have a third that places equal emphasis on both.

The reality is that you may not find an international school advertising suitable positions for both of you. So you can use your first two cover letters to apply to these schools. You should always apply to these schools because you don't know what kind of internal openings they may have that your partner could be suitable for! Or what may come up later...

If you do come across a school that has suitable vacancies for both of you, you send a cover letter that covers both of you equally.

Sending two cover letters is an invitation to the recruiter to read neither, it is too much like work!

Sending a single cover letter shows that you are a duo who can work together well.

Check out the detailed advice for what to include in your cover letter on pages 48 through 50 of The Complete Guide to Securing a Job at an International School

Overseas Teaching Job Fairs - too many interveiw invitations!

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.

Interviews for Teaching Jobs Overseas at International Teaching Job Fairs

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 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.

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.