Teaching Applications and Email Attachments

When you are sending your teaching application to international school recruiters via email you will want to attach your resume, a photo, your teaching philosophy, etc. But here is where you run into a problem...

Many email clients restrict the size of the attachments allowed into people’s inboxes. And while you want to attach the elements of your application pack to support you email, you also want to ensure that your email is delivered.

If your email (including attachments) is too large, it will get bounced back to you. The solution to this problem is to make sure your documents are concise and without images, not to zip them.

When you zip your documents you are assuming that the recruiter has the software required to unzip them, and the desire to do so. It's important that you keep the number of steps the recruiter has to take to see your resume to an absolute minimum as this increases the chances of them actually reading it!

If you want to include a photo of yourself, don't put it in your resume, attach it to your email as a .jpg separately.

Email Teaching Applications Keep it Formal

We are so used to firing off emails to our friends and colleagues that poor grammar, spelling and layout has become habit.

Now, I'm not knocking informal email ettiquette at all, and I'm as guilty as the rest of being very casual and relaxed in my attitude to paragraphing and using capital letters in my emails.

But this is not acceptable in an email that you send to an international school recruiter applying for a teaching position abroad. Just because you're sending an email doesn't mean that you should write like they're your best buddy. They're not. Your emails should be formal and follow the accepted letter writing rules...

Avoid using abbreviations and emoticons:

While those little winks ;) and smiles :) are cute and useful in conveying non-verbal communication clues in personal emails, they have no place in a business email.

Write formally, without contractions or short cuts. LOL, OTOH, and BTW are not appropriate in this setting, remember that you are sending a formal letter asking the recruiter to consider you for a teaching job in an international school.

This may all seem obvious to you and it certainly does to me, but I was shocked to receive an email recently from an individual that had ‘u’ instead of ‘you’. I was less than impressed.