Art Teach Travel

Thanks, Jane! 🙂

Reining it in.

My profile has been active for two weeks in preparation for this coming hiring season. In that time, two different schools have contacted me, making some inquiries about next school year, which is twelve months away! The 2017 international hiring season has already started. This is really different for American teachers who don’t start looking for teaching positions until late spring of the teaching year they are interested in. The international hiring season can last through summer, but it starts early.

Locating and scanning required paperwork will take some time, but once you have it, you won’t have to go through this process ever again if you maintain an organized computer desktop. There are specific documents that you will need to have on hand no matter which recruitment agency you decide to go with. Some documents may take some time to track down, so it is best to start now.

Organizing Your Desktop:

I have listed below the documents you will need for your recruiting agency profile. These documents will be saved in either pdf or jpg formats. Be very organized as you set up files on your computer desktop. You will find that the process of finding an overseas teaching position can quickly get out of control if you are not diligent about being organized. You will soon be communicating with schools all over planet Earth. Set up a folder titled “2017 International Jobs” and inside this folder, set up a folder called “Recommendations and Scans “. Put all documents and scans, shown below, inside this folder.

Required and Scanned Paperwork:
(200-300 dpi on all scans)
• 3-5 Recommendation Letters from current/former school administrators (on school letterhead, saved as a pdf file)
• 3 Recommendation Letters from current/former student parents (saved as pdf file)
• Criminal Background Check
• Birth Certificate
• Certificate to Teach
• Passport
• University Degree
• Official Copy of University Transcript – you will also need to have some of these in hardcopy form, unopened, to give to your new school, so order plenty when you contact your university.
• Training certificates, i.e. PYP/MYP/IB Level Certificates
• Philosophy of Education (Word document saved as pdf file)
• Nice, smiling, front facing headshot of YOU. Plain background. Black and White. This will be used for your resume.

Filling out the Recruitment Agency Application/Profile:

When you have all these documents collected and scanned, and after you’ve paid your fee, you are ready to proceed in filling out the Profile section of your recruitment agency’s website. Your recruitment agency will notify you if something is missing and when the Profile is ready to go live for schools to see! I was able to “click” a button on my Search Associates Profile that allows me to receive daily job listings. As new schools post their openings, I am automatically sent a daily email. You can choose to receive all the daily listings, or only the ones for your subject area. Although it is really interesting to receive daily emails about ALL the teaching opportunities, it quickly becomes “too much” and I have opted to simply get the Art openings. Even so, by December and January, there are so many opportunities to teach it will blow your mind! —And that is only with Search Associates!

When you are required to type lengthy answers, please copy/paste what you wrote into an empty Word document and save it into another folder titled, “My Answers”. You will be able to utilize some of this material in other applications in the future. By saving it, you won’t have to start from scratch every time.

Next week I will be giving you tips on setting up your resume and cover letter. I want to stress again the importance of starting this process early and staying organized. Can you quickly find what you need to access when you are in the middle of a Skype interview at 3:00 am?

Which agency have you decided to go with? How did you make your decision?

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