Educational Psychologist CV Example

An educational psychologist CV that's well-written, engaging and showcases the most relevant skills and experience gives you the best chance of progressing to the next stage of the recruitment process. We’ll now go through the key sections of a CV and explain how to write them strategically.

Key sections for an educational psychologist CV

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

At the end of the day, though, an educational psychologist CV is just a way to tell the story of how you’ve grown in your career. Regardless of your experience level, you want that progression to feel seamless and easy to follow for recruiters. To help you get there, we’re going to walk through each part of the CV step-by-step, starting with the basics in your header and working our way through to your professional achievements.

CV Header

At the top of your educational psychologist CV, add a header that establishes the design language of the document. Include the necessary contact information: your full name, email address, phone number and location. It's not typically necessary to include your full address. Additionally, including your LinkedIn profile as a URL can be useful, as it will help the reader to quickly and easily access further information about your career and credentials.

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 Objective

Below your contact information, a short, concise CV summary or CV objective can set the tone for your application and provide brief, basic information on your key skills and qualities that gives a strong indication to the reader about your suitability for the educational psychologist role. While the CV summary focuses on your key skills and achievements, a CV objective highlights your career ambitions, making it more suitable for junior candidates.

Whether you choose to write a summary or an objective, aim for a length of two or three sentences, introducing your key skills, unique qualities and key achievements or ambitions, making sure they reflect what's included in the job description.

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. Here's an example of an effective educational psychologist CV summary, with evidence of your impact and neat, well-structured sentences:

The CV summary above contains various red flags and things to avoid. While the differences are subtle, they can make all the difference. There are several factors that could make your summary less engaging. These include using long, poorly-structured sentences, failing to add evidence of your impact, being too generic with the skills you mention and not adapting your CV summary to specifically respond to the job description.

Work Experience

Work experience is usually the most important section of any CV. Employers will be looking for evidence of how you've developed relevant skills in your career to date, and how you've used them to positive effect in previous roles. Ensure you tailor your work experience section to reflect the job description and show you meet all the essential requirements. This means picking out skills and qualities as keywords and reflecting them back in your work experience bullet points, so employers can assess your likely fit for the role.

Create a list of all your most relevant roles, going back up to 10 or 15 years if necessary. Include your job title, the name of the employer, its location and the dates you worked there. Include bullet points that explain how you put your skills to good use in each previous role.

What differentiates an excellent work experience section from an average one is the use of action verbs and quantifiable evidence, showing how your actions led directly to positive results in previous roles. You'll also want to show how you've added relevant skills and increased your impact throughout your career progression. Here's an example of best practice in an educational psychologist CV work experience section:

Above is an example of what not to do with your educational psychologist CV. A less-engaging work experience section might include irrelevant roles or jobs from a long time ago, and generic information that fails to address the requirements of the job description. It could also lack evidence to support the claims made in the bullet points.

Education

Your education section should showcase your most recent and highest qualifications, paying particular attention to anything that's specifically required for the role.

To be eligible for educational psychologist positions, you typically need to have a relevant university degree, and include it in your CV. If you have a Bachelor of Science in Educational Psychology or another related degree that qualifies you for the role, you should definitely mention it in your CV, along with any other degrees or qualifications that highlight your most relevant skills, such as psychological assessment techniques or statistical data analysis.

Your education section should contain only the qualifications that you consider most relevant to the role. List them in reverse-chronological order, starting with the most recent and working back from there. For each entry, include the name and level of the degree or certification, the institution, its location and your graduation date or dates of study. To emphasise your qualifications and achievements, you might wish to include one or two bullet points, which highlight things like specialist areas of study, projects, dissertations or society memberships.

You might also wish to add specialist qualifications, certifications or licences that are required for the role. If you add any of these, include the expiry date, if the qualification requires renewal in the future.

Published Works and Key Projects

One way to gain an advantage in your applications is to add a section for key projects and publications, if you have any to showcase. List any contributions you've made to the academic discourse or knowledge base in your specialist area, whether these are journal articles, research papers or projects funded or sponsored by reputable institutions or awarding bodies.

When listing publications, use a standard citation style which is most suitable for the education sector. The most popular UK CV citation style is the Harvard style, but you could alternatively use the APA (American Psychological Association), MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association) or OSCOLA (Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities). Take a look below for an example of an educational psychologist CV publication, listed using the appropriate citation format:

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 an educational psychologist CV, focus on the most relevant and essential skills in your skills portfolio, such as empathy and behavioural intervention planning, to show you're qualified for the educational psychologist position and to put you in a strong position to progress.

Hard Skills

Hard skills are the specialist technical skills that are essential for carrying out the duties of the role. They might be developed through study, on-the-job training or experience in the industry, and some hard skills may require a licence or certification. For educational psychologist roles, key hard skills you've gained, such as psychological assessment techniques, and educational research methodologies, are typically among the most critical for the job. After reviewing the job description, compile a list of four or five key hard skills for your educational psychologist CV to show you're capable of carrying out the duties required for the role.

The ideal hard skills section will feature the most essential hard skills from the job description, while closely reflecting your own best technical abilities. The closer your strongest skills are to matching the job description, the higher your chances of success.

Below, you can find the types of skills typically featured in the hard skills section of an educational psychologist CV:

Soft Skills

Soft skills are the personal strengths and qualities that show employers how well you'll fit into the role and complement other members of the team. Soft skills tend to be more transferable and applicable to different roles than hard and technical skills. The world of work is evolving at a rapid pace, changing the types of hard skills required for many roles, and therefore rendering soft and transferable skills more valuable than ever. Soft skills are also extremely valuable for junior and entry-level roles, where candidates aren't necessarily expected to have a wealth of relevant work experience.

As with hard skills, review the job description to understand the best soft skills to mention in your educational psychologist CV. The best CV soft skills section includes specific skills that you can evidence with examples throughout your CV. Create a list of four or five transferable skills, combining the most essential skills from the job description with the skills that help you to stand out as a unique and compelling candidate for the position.

Consider the following soft skills that frequently appear in an educational psychologist CV.

Certifications

If you have extra qualifications beyond the basics of what's expected or required for the role, you might want to include a separate certifications section in your CV. It can be a valuable way of differentiating yourself from other candidates and showing employers your dedication, motivation and commitment to professional development. 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.

See below for a list of example certifications and licences you might add to your CV for educational psychologist roles:

Language Skills

If you speak any languages in addition to your mother tongue, you might want to include them in your educational psychologist 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 might wish to use an internationally recognised standard for your language skills, such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). This divides your language skills into the following categories:

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

Optional Sections

Including optional sections in addition to the core sections of your educational psychologist CV can help you to show employers you're a strong candidate for the job. Consider optional sections for your CV if you're looking for ways to show you're right for the job, beyond your work experience. Optional sections are particularly valuable if you haven't had the chance to build up relevant work experience, for example, if you're applying for entry-level roles or you're changing careers to a new industry or role.

You can find more detailed advice on tailoring your CV in our career resources, where we cover proven ways to highlight your skills effectively.

Hobbies and Interests

One valid way to show you have relevant skills for the job is by listing your hobbies and interests. In addition, you can use hobbies and interests to show elements of your personality that might not shine through otherwise, giving you a chance to offer something different to most candidates. However, a hobbies and interests section will only make an impact with the reader if the skills you showcase are relevant to the role. As such, only include this section if it helps you fulfil requirements of the role that you've been unable to show elsewhere.

Achievements

Compiling your key career achievements into a single list is an effective way of making your CV more readable at a glance. Add any awards you've won or career milestones you've reached, so employers can easily see the impact you've made in your career to date.

Volunteering

Listing volunteer roles is another effective way of showing employers your skills and experience. If you're lacking work experience, either as a junior candidate or a career changer, adding volunteering activities gives you a chance to show how you've put your skills into action. Approach your volunteering section in much the same way as your work experience section.

For each entry, include a job title or description of your role, the organisation, its location and the dates you volunteered. Adding bullet points can also help you to show how you developed relevant skills, and used them to good effect.

References

References aren't usually required on a UK CV, so leave them out in most cases. However, it's always worth checking the job advert and being ready to include them if requested. 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 an educational psychologist CV

Including strong action verbs with your work experience bullet points can help you show the impact you made in previous roles. Starting each bullet point with an action verb is a great way to match your experience and achievements to the job description, giving the reader an easy way of identifying your key skills and seeing how you've applied them. When adding action verbs to your work experience bullet points, just remember to always provide quantifiable evidence that shows the value you added for each employer. Use past tense for any action verbs that describe previous roles (for example, 'developed') and present tense for current roles (for example 'collaborating').

Full example of educational psychologist CV

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

To get an idea of how your completed, one-page CV will look once its been fully designed, see our selection of CV examples.

Tips for optimising your CV for ATS

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are now commonly used by employers, to help them manage the recruitment process. One of the main functions of ATS software is the scanning and ranking of CVs according to their likely suitability for the role. By assuming this role in the recruitment process, ATS apps can reduce the amount of time employers need to spend reviewing CVs. With hundreds of applications for a single vacancy becoming increasingly commonplace, this increased efficiency is extremely valuable for employers.

The growing prevalence of ATS means candidates need to write and format their CV in a way that's compatible with the software, giving it the best chance of being accurately scanned and parsed, and ranking highly against other candidates. Here are some tips on how to optimise your CV for ATS screening:

• Include keywords and phrases that match the job description, giving you the best chance of appearing as a strong fit for the role.
• Use clear headings that reflect standard CV conventions, such as 'work experience', 'education' and 'skills'.
• Opt for a simple CV layout with consistent formatting, avoiding any special design elements that could make your CV harder for ATS apps to scan.
• Select a font that can enhance the readability of your CV, such as popular serif and sans serif fonts, with size 10 to 12 for body text and 14 to 16 for headings.
• Use bullet points rather than writing long, full sentences, as this will make your CV easier to scan and parse, and help your keywords and phrases to stand out.

You might feel there are a lot of things to remember when writing an ATS-compatible CV, but with just a few small tweaks, you can ensure yours passes this stage. Use one of our expert-designed, ATS-compatible CV templates to avoid the stress of adapting your CV for ATS screening.

Key takeaways for your educational psychologist 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. Use a CV format that reflects your experience levels, and emphasise your skills and achievements throughout your CV, to show employers you've got the required skills and experience for the job.

Finally, using an eye-catching, expert-designed CV template from Jobseeker can really give your CV an edge over those from rival candidates, helping you to achieve success in your job applications.

References:

1. jobs.ac.uk, What is an Academic CV?
2. Jobseeker, HR Insights