Job Discussion Forums

[PhilOffice]

Greetings,

I am a Canadian teacher with a bachelor's degree in ESL (4 years), and with 2 years of experience working full-time in a Canadian private school. I am looking to work abroad for a couple of years and Hong-Kong seems like a logical destination. I have been there already for a couple weeks so I (sorta) know what to expect. Also, I would imagine Hong-Kong has a lot of international schools.

With my qualifications, technically I am eligible to work in international school. While it could be easy to simply do a Google search and look for international schools in Hong Kong, I am hoping somebody has a recommendation for me.

Is it possible to find a job in an international school without knowing someone in advance? What schools do you think I should apply to? Does somebody here already work in an international school?

[CEB]

Would an international school consider you with a bachelor's of ESL? I would think that they don't really focus on ESL so would rather a BEd or PGDE.

You would probably have a good chance of being hired as a teaching assistance but then your salary would be much lower and you'd have fewer benefits.

For the big schools like ESF and other international schools, they probably wouldn't consider you unless you had experience teaching an IB curriculum.

I may be wrong though, those are just my thoughts.

[sistercream]

A big difference between international schools in Hong Kong and those in many other places is that here, kids are admitted to them because they already have the English skills necessary to study in English, not in order to acquire the language.

There are some big international schools which run parallel streams, such as German Swiss, French, Japanese, and Korean, but my experience has been that they want regular classroom teachers who also have EFL/ DaF/ FLE/ whatever qualifications: you have your own class for most of the day, but for one lesson (or session) each day you exchange classrooms with a teacher from the other language stream.

There could be exceptions that I haven't heard about.

The one possibility for you I can think of offhand would be in the Delia group of schools. At least one of them (Hip Wo, i think) runs an induction programme for newly arrived juvenile asylum claimants.