Teaching Couple Letter of Application

[Nomadic Teacher]

Hi All,

My wife and I are working as a teaching couple in an International School. We are in the process of applying for new jobs, and I wonder if we should write a joint letter of application, or instead write separate letters?

Does anyone have any ideas/advice?

Many thanks,

Nomadic Teacher

[Android]

I think it would be best and professional to write separate letters. After all, even though teaching couples are great assets to a school, they still have to look at your individual qualifications and characters! I guess it wouldn't hurt to mention that you have a wife who is also a teacher but don't make that the main point of your letter.

[wrldtrvlr123]

I would offer a different point of view. We have a combined cover letter that presents both members of the teaching couple. We then attach separate CV's for each person. We've gotten positions in 3 countries and I don't think it has ever been viewed as not being professional (though of course I have no real way of knowing that :-S). I think either way you go would be fine.

[nikkor]

I agree with wrldtrvlr. 99% of the time, couples interview together and only come as a package. When my wife and I would send letters of interest to schools, we would send a joint cover letter, her cv, her letters of rec, my cv, my letters of rec.

[seinfeld]

Yes, joint letter is best. Some schools will just see two separate applications and think of you as separates SALARIES!

[PsyGuy]

I'm single so cant say, but I strongly support wrldtrvlr123's approach. As an admin this year and part of the leadership and hiring team, I like the combined cover letter and individual resumes as a package (please, please staple them). Its too easy to get them mixed up and loose the teaching couple unity of an application. My job this week was to sort through the resumes for next year into "IB Experience", and "No IB experience", and I know I mixed some of the teaching couples up.

By the way, for you American candidates, it would really help if you formatted your word documents for A4 sized paper instead of US Letter, it kind of messes with the flow of your resume and makes it distracting to read (especially if you used a template in Word to make it) either that or send PDF documents. You can do this (thanks to Ichiro) by selecting >File...Print...Save As...PDF< and giving it a file name, make sure it has the PDF extension (.pdf) at the end of the file name.

[markholmes]

Ha, the A4 formatting had never occurred to me. Good point.

My wife and I send joint cover letters, followed by my resume, then my wife's, then everything else requested. We started off with a joint cover plus individual letters, but I found it was just too much info and the PDF was just too long.

A single cover letter seems to work, and makes you look like a team.

[PsyGuy]

We dont read cover letters first. In fact we have to flip all the cover letters over then paperclip each packet together, because when were sorting, Im looking for: Experience THEN References THEN Degrees THEN Certificates. Nothing else matters really.

Honestly, all the cover letters are the same. None of us on the leadership team read them. We have close to 600 resumes this year for 2 vacancies so far, and we want to get it down to 10 for each position. So far we sorted them by: 1) IB experience, 2) Advance degree, 3) Multiple certifications, 4) Single teachers (there werent any joint applications for our two vacancies). Despite that we still have about 65 applicants per position.

Also, for American Candidates since its not standard practice in the USA, you should include a photo with your application materials, but DONT put it on your resume/CV. When we print all of them out, we do it on a B&W laser printer and it just makes an ugly black box on your resume. When you send files group them by content. All your degree/transcripts should be in one file, all your references should be in one file. Your resume should be one file (I HATE when someone attaches Cover1, Cover2, Resume1, Resume2, etc as individual files, its a pain to click on them and print each one. I want to open your email and right click, print, on your resume attachment). Personally, I send my cover separate from my resume, but it seems a lot of people send them together as a single attachment (maybe ive been doing it wrong?). Lastly, you really dont need to send transcripts, references, degrees, passport scans, etc, unless its specifically requested. All those documents just slow down the connection, and the servers response. When you open up email, the server has to download all your emails before it displays them, and with the number of applicants we get and all those document attachments, well starting up the computer takes long enough for a bathroom break, and tea stop before its ready. Lastly, if your email is too big because you did very high end scans of your documents you might choke the system, and the only way to really move on is to delete the email, meaning we didnt even look at your application materials.

Postal Script: If your not in any way qualified for the position dont apply. A degree by itself does not qualify you to teach anything or everything. Working with children does not make you a teacher. Several times Ive been looking at a resume, wondering what's wrong, etc and realize that the applicant isnt even a teacher.

[Gipper]

Just wondering PsyGuy, when you say "sort" do you mean that a person with IB experience AND advanced degree AND multiple certifications would go right to the top of the "pile?"

[PsyGuy]

I didnt start that way but thats how it turned out. Our Dip principal says he wants 10 candidates for each position. So then I find out theres some 571 applications. So were an IB school and we dont have a huge training budget, so I made two piles those with IB experience and those who didnt. Still had too big of a pile, so I divided them again into those who had a Masters degree and those who didnt. Still way too big a pile. Then i split it into those who had more then 1 certification and those who didnt, still way too big a pile, so then i divided it into those who had more then 2 certifications, then those with more then 3 certifications,and then the certification sorting was messy, because the certifications either were very similar to one another or they were in subjects that couldnt possibly help us, because we dont even offer those types of classes (like industrial arts, agricultural science, drivers ed, etc). So then I started going through their certification list and gave them a weighted score based on what they could teach that we offered: 4 points for high demand, 2 points for core subjects, 1 point for subjects we offered, 0 points for irrelevant subjects or single subject certified. Then I split that that pile in half. Thats where I am now, and I still have about 65 per application. The junior admins and myself are meeting this week to go over them and whittle it down from there.

So yes the "In" pile is composed of those with IB experience, a masters degree, and more then one certification.

[Gipper]

Interesting. Thanks and good luck getting down to the magnificent ten!

[sanath123]

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[PsyGuy]

Seriously, are the grammar gnomes punking me? Its not going to change how i write.