Your CV gets eight seconds before someone decides.

The guide

Six changes, in order of how much they move the needle

1. 01

   Put the board and the designation before the chronology

   A career-narrative opening asks the reader to do the work of finding you. A principal filtering a stack of applications for a PGT Physics post is matching on board, subject and the classes you have actually taught first, and everything else second. If the reader has to reach your third role in 2017 to discover you have taught Class XII, most will not reach it.

   • Line one under your name: "PGT Physics · Classes XI–XII · CBSE · 9 years · currently Nagpur".
   • Use the designation the vacancy uses — PRT for pre-primary to Class V, TGT for VI–X, PGT for XI–XII — and say plainly where you have taught across two of them.
   • Name every board you have genuinely taught: CBSE, ICSE and ISC (CISCE), your state board by name, and IB or IGCSE where you have actually delivered it. Spell out an acronym once.
   • If you are moving between boards, say so and name what you have done about it — syllabus training, a workshop, a year of teaching both. Organizations hire across boards constantly; they just want it stated rather than discovered.
2. 02

   Write outcomes, not the job description

   Every organization knows what a teacher does. What they cannot guess is what changed because you were the one doing it. "Taught Class XI chemistry" describes a timetable slot. "Took Class XII chemistry from a 62% to an 84% share of students scoring 75 and above, across two cohorts of 58" describes a teacher, and it is the sentence that gets read aloud in the shortlisting meeting.

   • Attach a number wherever it is honest: board pass percentage, subject average, distinctions, cohort size, how many carried the subject into Class XI, attendance in your remedial group.
   • If you cannot quantify it, describe what you built — a question bank, a remedial timetable, a new elective, a bridge programme from the Class X syllabus into XI.
   • Name what you led beyond your own classroom: mentoring, question-paper setting, board evaluation duty, a whole-organization reading push, house or activity in-charge work.
   • Two or three outcome lines per role beats eight duty lines. The duty lines are the ones readers skip.
3. 03

   Say the things a screening reader cannot assume

   A CV written for the organization down the road assumes a shared context: the reader knows your college, your board, your organization's standing and your notice period without being told. Sent to an organization in another city or another state, none of that survives. Every assumption you leave implicit is a question the reader has to answer on your behalf, and a screening reader will not.

   • Spell the qualification out with years: "M.Sc. Physics, 2014 · B.Ed., 2016 · CTET Paper II qualified, 2017" travels; "M.Sc., B.Ed." alone leaves the reader guessing.
   • Give your organization context in one clause — "a CBSE-affiliated senior secondary organization running three sections a grade" — because the organization's name means nothing outside its own district.
   • Give the city and the state, not just the locality, and keep one date format throughout.
   • State availability explicitly: notice period in months, the session you can start in, and the cities or states you would genuinely relocate to.
   • Include a mobile number you actually answer and an email you will still control after you resign.
4. 04

   Make the child-safety and reference section unambiguous

   Organizations carry statutory child-protection obligations under POCSO, and an incomplete compliance section is an immediate no rather than a follow-up email. Recruitment leads work to a checklist — child-safety training, police verification, and references from someone who actually supervised you. Anything missing from that checklist reads as a risk, whether or not it is one.

   • POCSO awareness or child-protection training, with who ran it and when you last refreshed it.
   • Police verification status, and whether the certificate is current — the organization has to complete it before you join, so knowing where yours stands saves a fortnight.
   • Two referees who actually supervised you — your reporting principal, vice principal or HOD — with their organization email addresses, not personal ones.
   • "References available on request" costs you nothing to delete and buys you the reader's confidence. Name them.
   • Explain any gap of more than three months plainly. An unexplained gap is the single most common thing a recruiter will stop on.
5. 05

   Two pages, one column, a text PDF

   Two pages is both the norm and the ceiling. Past that, later pages are skimmed rather than read, and the strongest material is usually buried in them. Format matters as much as length: a CV that arrives as an image of a CV cannot be searched, parsed, or quoted back to a hiring panel — and in an organization running an applicant tracking system, it may not be readable at all.

   • Export as PDF with selectable text. Never a scan, a photo of a printout, or a flattened image.
   • One column. Two-column layouts read out of order in most parsing systems and in screen readers.
   • Leave out date of birth, marital status, religion, caste, father's name and any Aadhaar or PAN number. None of it helps a shortlisting decision. A photograph belongs on the organization's own application form, if they ask for one, not on the CV.
   • Name the file with your own name and the role: "Ananya-Rao-PGT-Physics.pdf", not "cv_final_v3.pdf".
   • Keep one typeface, one date format and one heading style throughout. Inconsistency reads as carelessness on a document about attention to detail.
6. 06

   Tailor the top six lines, reuse everything below

   Rewriting a CV for every application is unsustainable and does not measurably help. Rewriting the top of it does. The header and summary should answer the specific listing in the listing's own language; the experience section beneath can stay exactly as it is, with only the order changed.

   • Mirror the listing's wording for subject, classes and board — if they wrote "TGT Social Science", do not write "middle organization humanities".
   • Move the most relevant post to the top of your experience even when it is not the most recent, and label it clearly.
   • Cut anything older than fifteen years to a single line unless it is genuinely load-bearing.
   • If the organization names a joining date or a session, answer it in the summary. It removes the main reason strong applications stall.

Worked example

One role, rewritten

The same four years at the same organization. On the left, what most drafts contain — an accurate description of a job that almost any teacher in the subject could have written. On the right, the same four years with the board named, the results measured and the scope of the work made visible.

Nothing has been invented. Everything on the right was already true of the teacher on the left; it simply was not on the page.