The Thread

We all know selecting a future employer abroad is not easy. According to the article Qualifying Schools at wiki.Galbijim.com, the best way to select a school is to fly to the country where you want to teach and do your job search from there.

But, as Keith Taylor explains, “there are some pros and cons to this approach. On the plus side, some schools are more likely to hire you if they have met you face to face, and you are already established in a place. But the risk is spending a lot of time and money with no guarantee of finding a job, particularly if you are newly qualified and the majority of schools in that country require several years of experience.

If you choose this route then, get to know the typical requirements of schools first by looking at job adverts, or contact some schools directly before you go“. - Source: Getting Started in TEFL: Finding Your First TEFL Job.

If, however, you choose to do the research from home, you should communicate with the schools you are considering and request the contact information of former and departing teachers. The article at Galbijim lists a number of questions to ask these teachers:

• Why are they leaving? Is it because their contract is up and they are moving on, or is there something about the school that they didn’t like?
• What are the other teachers like to work with?
• What’s the social life among teachers? Does everyone hang out with each other?
• How’s the english level of the school director?
• Has the school been not only deducting, but actually paying into National Health Insurance and Pension?
• Did you ever see how the school handles a situation when a teacher became very sick or needed hospitalization?
• How does the holiday time work? How flexible is it and how much say did you have in when you could take it?
• What’re the accommodations like?
• What is provided in the accommodation? How far away is an E-Mart, Homeplus or anywhere else I can get stuff for my apartment?
• How attentive and responsive is the school on dealing with any problems or needs that you have with your apartment?
• What’s the actual weekly teaching schedule like? (ie., what’s an example of the shift on Monday, Tuesday, etc…)
• Does the school follow the contract to the letter, or do they give some flexibility, if shown flexibility?

- Source: Qualifying Schools at wiki.Galbijim.com

In addition, you can do research by visiting websites dedicated to providing school reviews. But before we give you a list of such sites, we would like to again quote Galbijim which gives sound advice regarding this method:

“One aspect of qualifying schools that has surfaced over the years, has been blacklists. These are websites that have been set up for teachers to write complaints or cautionary warning against their ex-employers. Given the lack of any other information, prospective teachers tend to eat that stuff up, despite not knowing how biased, embellished, or fabricated the story could be of the teacher raising the warning.

We’re not going to sit here and tell you that the ESL industry is all warm and fuzzy, and that only the kooks get themselves into hot water. Genuinely normal folks get screwed now and then over here, just as much as flakey teachers screw over good schools. The problem is that you don’t know if you are reading a testimonial from a teacher who has a bona fide disorder of some kind and would even make unrealistic complaints about working at any job in North America, or if this is a real complaint from some innocent lamb that got blind-sided. In our collective experience from being teachers, formerly running recruitment companies, managing teachers at large ESL schools in Korea, we’ve been in the middle of both sides of disputes, and far more often than what gets made out to believe, the teacher is equally as guilty as the school or recruiter, if not more so. And there have been many times that the teacher’s version of the story gets put up on the net, without any counter-argument, and people eat it up. One thing is certain, however, you will never, ever read or hear someone complain about their job or ex-job and say, “..but, in fairness, I may have also aggravated the situation, by doing blah-blah…” ” - Source: Qualifying Schools at wiki.Galbijim.com

Still interested in checking out those sites? Here are some of them:

• International Schools Review - Over 1000 reviews from teachers working at international schools. It is $29 a year.
• ESL Teachers Board - School and Recruiter Reviews
• TEFL Watch - A site where people can rate schools and share their experiences.
• School Reports @ ExpatExchange.com
• Iantravel.com - Ian has been teaching abroad for 8 years and has visited 55 countries so far. You can read his adventures in his bilingual Travel Log. Also of interest is his Teaching Abroad page featuring reviews & comments on international schools.