Childcare CV Example

If you write a childcare CV that's more professional and engaging, it will help you progress through the ATS screening stage. Ultimately, it will also give you the best chance to impress the hiring manager, which will boost your prospects of reaching the interview stage. We’ll now go through the key sections of a CV and explain how to write them strategically.

Main sections of a childcare CV

Your strategy for writing a childcare CV will depend heavily on your experience, your level of seniority and the requirements listed in the job description.

However, regardless of your seniority, a childcare CV needs to tell a cohesive story of your professional growth. In the following sections, we’ll dive into each part of the CV step-by-step, starting with your header and moving through to your professional achievements.

CV Header

Start your childcare CV with a professional-looking header that includes all the relevant contact information. This usually includes your name, your email address, your phone number and your location, but not your full address. Additionally, consider adding a URL to your LinkedIn profile if you have one. This can help the reader to quickly access further information about your career and credentials that you haven't been able to add to your CV.

For jobs in the UK, a personal photo is usually not required on your CV. That, along with any other personal details such as age, gender, ethnicity and nationality, are generally discouraged under the terms of the Equality Act 2010, which aims to reduce and eliminate discriminatory practices, such as recruitment bias.

CV Summary

Under your header, write a brief CV summary or CV objective, outlining a few of your key skills, qualities and achievements. This short paragraph can help employers to quickly assess your suitability for the role, setting the tone for your childcare CV. While a CV summary showcases your key skills and achievements in the context of your career to date, a CV objective provides an alternative approach. It focuses instead on your ambitions for the future, making it ideal for junior candidates without much work experience.

For either a CV summary or an objective, aim for a length of two or three sentences. Showcase a few key skills, personal qualities and career achievements or ambitions, always reviewing the job description as you write, to show how you fulfil the requirements of the role.

A good CV summary would typically focus on a couple of key skills that match the job description, demonstrating how you've used them to good effect in previous roles. It's important to focus on your unique qualities and provide a preview of how they've made an impact in your career to date, which you'll unpack later in the document. Find an example below of a positive childcare CV summary, characterised by evidence to support your claims and well-structured, easy-to-read sentences.

Above is an example of a less effective CV summary, with some subtle, yet notable differences. Common mistakes that lead to an ineffective summary include a lack of quantifiable experience, vague statements or failing to tailor your summary to the job description. Long, rambling sentences that lack structure can also make your summary harder to read.

Work Experience

A CV's work experience section is usually its most important element. Employers tend to value the work experience section, as it shows evidence of how you've put your relevant skills to good use in your career to date. Always take the time to tailor this section, including keywords and phrases that match the job description. This will help employers to judge how strong a fit you are for the role, and how you might apply your skills for the benefit of the organisation.

Add your most relevant previous jobs, including the job title, the name of the employer, its location and the dates you worked there. Below each entry, include several bullet points showcasing your skills and explaining how you used these to achieve positive results.

What differentiates one CV work experience section from all the others is the use of action verbs and quantifiable evidence in your bullet points. It should showcase how your actions led to positive outcomes for the employer, and show a progression in your skills throughout your career. Take a look at an example of a strong childcare CV work experience section below.

Above is an example of what not to do with your childcare CV. A less-effective work experience section could focus too much on irrelevant or out-of-date roles, or include generic information about your responsibilities that fails to show the impact you made. It might lack tailoring to the job description or fail to provide evidence to support the claims made in the bullet points.

Skills

In your CV's skills section, you'll want to draw attention to some of your strongest skills that make you suitable for the role. Review the job description to get an idea of the most essential skills, and create a list of hard and soft skills, including some of your strongest, most unique qualities that set you apart from other candidates. In a childcare CV, focus on the most relevant and essential skills in your skills portfolio, such as empathy and risk assessment techniques, to show you're qualified for the childcare worker position and to put you in a strong position to progress.

Hard Skills

Hard skills and technical skills are the specialist skills required for completing the everyday duties of the role, such as the use of certain software or equipment, or specialist industry knowledge. You can develop these skills through study, training, on-the-job or through completing industry certifications. For childcare worker positions, hard skills that match your abilities, such as child development observation techniques, and behaviour management techniques tend to be valued by recruiters and hiring managers. Review the job description, and include four or five key hard skills in your CV that show employers you're capable of completing the key duties of the role.

The best hard skills to include are typically listed as 'essential' or 'required' in the job description. Aim for a mix of the most desirable skills, together with those you have the highest proficiency in. For the best chance of success, you'll want your strongest skills to match closely with those most desired by the employer.

The following section highlights skills that are commonly listed under hard skills in a childcare CV:

Soft Skills

Soft skills differ from hard skills because they tend to be more transferable and applicable to different roles. Soft skills are the personal strengths and qualities that define your style of working and determine how well you're likely to fit in with the team and wider organisation. Transferable skills are among the most in-demand skills for employers, with rapidly changing and evolving ways of working requiring ever-more flexible and adaptable employees. Soft skills are also highly valuable for junior and entry-level positions, where candidates aren't expected to have a wealth of relevant work experience and career achievements.

As with hard skills, review the job description to understand the best soft skills to mention in your childcare CV. The best CV soft skills section includes specific skills that you can evidence with examples throughout your CV. Your soft skills list should reflect the job description as closely as possible, while also reflecting your strongest, unique talents and personal qualities. Aim for a list of around five key skills.

The section below provides an overview of soft skills often highlighted in a childcare CV.

Education

In your education section, list any formal qualifications you've gained, particularly those that are most recent or required for the role.

To work as a childcare worker, it's not necessary to have a specific degree. However, while a degree isn't usually requested in the job description, it can be useful to include other relevant qualifications in your CV's education section. These might include Paediatric First Aid Certificate, or other courses that show your hard skills, such as paediatric first aid qualification or child development observation techniques.

Creating the education section of your CV means selecting the most relevant and highest qualifications, and listing them in reverse-chronological order, starting with your most recent achievements and working back from there. For each qualification, add its name and level, the awarding body or institution, its location (if necessary) and your dates of attendance or graduation. If you want to emphasise your education in your CV, include bullet points showing specialist areas of study, projects, awards, society memberships or anything else that helps show you've got the necessary skills for the job.

It may also be useful for you to add any specialist industry qualifications, certifications or licences that you might require for the role. If you choose to add these, remember also to add an expiration date, if the licence requires renewal in the future.

Certifications

To showcase additional qualifications and training beyond the basic requirements for the role, consider adding a certifications section to your CV. Having a separate section can draw more attention to your training, and show employers your proactive, motivated mindset towards professional development, which could be a key asset. Furthermore, a certifications section is particularly valuable if you're applying for a role that sets out required certifications or licences in the job description. These might include technical roles that require the use of specialist software or equipment.

Take a look at this list of example certifications and licences for childcare worker candidates:

Language Skills

If you speak any languages in addition to your mother tongue, you might want to include them in your childcare CV as a languages section. These can be valuable for your application, whether languages are specified as a requirement in the job description or not. Within this section, list the foreign languages you speak to a reasonable degree of competence, together with an indicator of your skill levels.

There are a few acceptable ways of citing your foreign language proficiency levels. The simplest way is to assign a basic descriptive word to indicate your skills, such as:

• English: Fluent
• Spanish: Intermediate

You could otherwise use an internationally recognised language standard, such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). This assigns your language skills a standardised level of competence, as follows:

• A1: Beginner
• A2: Elementary
• B1: Intermediate
• B2: Upper intermediate
• C1: Advanced
• C2: Proficiency

Additional Information

Including optional sections in addition to the core sections of your childcare CV can help you to show employers you're a strong candidate for the job. If you're unable to show you have all the necessary skills for the job through your work experience, optional sections can be a valid way of providing further evidence of your suitability, to give you the chance of gaining an interview. If you're an entry-level candidate or a career changer, optional sections can be particularly valuable.

Explore our career resources for practical strategies to make your CV stand out and move you closer to landing an interview.

Hobbies and Interests

If you have any hobbies and interests that can showcase skills relevant to the job description, it might be worth including them. Additionally, this section gives you the chance to show employers different facets of your personality and interests beyond work, which can help them to differentiate you from other applicants. However, only mention hobbies and interests that are relevant to the role, and that help you prove skills that you haven't been able to show in your work experience or other CV sections.

Voluntary Work

Another alternative to showcasing your skills and experience through work experience is by adding a volunteering section. This can give you a valuable showcase of your skills, particularly if you're a junior candidate or career changer without much relevant work experience. In your volunteering section, use a similar structure to your work experience section.

Add your job title or a description of the volunteer role, the organisation name, its location and the dates you volunteered (start and end date). Under this, add bullet points to show the skills you used, and evidence of how they contributed to positive achievements for the organisation.

References

When applying for roles in the UK, it's not standard to include references on your CV, and employers only tend to require them later in the process. Nevertheless, it's worth checking the job advert and being ready just in case. If you need to include references in your CV, aim for two or three and list their name, their contact details, their job title and the organisation they work for.

Always seek permission before you add them to your CV. Alternatively, it can be neater to simply add a line to your CV confirming you can provide references at the appropriate juncture, such as 'references are available upon request'.

Best action words for a childcare CV

Adding strong action verbs to the bullet points in your CV's work experience section is a great way to focus on the key skills required for the job, while showing the impact you've made. Start each bullet point with an action word that reflects the job description, so the reader can easily identify your best qualities. Remember to always back up the action verbs you use with quantifiable evidence that shows the impact you made. You can use past tense for any action verbs describing previous jobs, with present tense for action verbs to describe your current role and responsibilities.

Childcare CV example

Now that you're aware of the key steps to creating a winning childcare CV, you can review a complete example to see how a final CV looks:

To see how your CV might look after finalising its design and layout, take a look at our CV examples.

Guide to CV ATS optimisation

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are becoming more and more integral to the recruitment process for many employers. These systems ease the burden of the recruitment process by performing various tasks, including scanning and ranking CVs based on their likely fit to the job description. This saves recruiters and hiring managers the time and effort of reading every CV in detail. With many vacancies often receiving hundreds of applications, ATS software can really relieve the burden on hiring teams and free them up to focus only on the most suitable candidates.

Because ATS software is becoming more common in the recruitment process, it's important to make some concessions in your CV to give yourself the best chance of progressing beyond the initial screening. With that in mind, here are some tips on preparing your CV for ATS screening:

• Include keywords and phrases that match the job description, making it easy for ATS apps to identify a strong fit for the role.
• Use clear, standard CV headings that are easily recognisable, such as 'work experience', 'education' and 'skills'.
• Choose a standard CV layout that avoids the use of any special design elements that might make your CV less compatible with ATS scanning software.
• Select a font that's widely used and maximises readability, including popular serif and sans serif fonts between size 10 and 12 for body text, and 14 and 16 for headings.
• Use bullet points throughout your CV in place of full sentences. This serves a few purposes, reducing the overall length, helping keywords stand out and making it overall more scannable by ATS apps.

You might feel there are a lot of steps to creating an ATS-compatible childcare CV, but with just a few small changes, you can ensure your CV passes this stage. Use one of our ATS-compatible CV templates, which are designed by experts to give you the best chances of success.

Key takeaways for a successful childcare CV

To make a strong first impression on hiring managers, tailor your CV for every application, adding keywords and phrases that match the job description. Select a suitable CV format that reflects your experience level, and focus on highlighting your key skills, and demonstrating how you've put them to good use to achieve positive outcomes in your career to date.

Finally, using a clean, professional CV template like those offered by Jobseeker, can help your CV stand out among its competitors and give you the best chance of success with your applications.

References:

1. JobHelp (UK Department for Work & Pensions campaign), No work experience? Focus on what you do have
2. Jobseeker, HR Insights