Job Discussion Forums

[biffinbridge]

This industry will last until wages are not sufficient for food and housing.....it's heading there right now.250,000yen has been the going rate in Japan for 10 years.Salaries in the ME are not increasing.EFL seems to be the only profession I know where teachers' salaries go down and not up, year on year, once you factor in inflation.

[31]

I agree with biffinbridge.

Language school salaries in Istanbul are the same now as they were ten years ago and now don`t all offer free accomodation. Prices have really risen in ten years here and back home.

The same thing has happened at the British Council. By looking at the BC job ads you can see that salaries there don`t seem to have changed for ten years.

It is OK for newbies in their twenties but for married people with kids its hopeless. TEFL is becoming a gap year type thing and maybe that is a good thing so people don`t get stuck in it.

[tedkarma]

True in some countries, perhaps not true in others.

Wages seem to have increased in Thailand in the last couple years (my opinion).

When I first worked at a college in Korea (1993) my starting wage was W1,100,000 - when I returned a couple years ago it was W2,500,000 - a significant improvement though the won moved from US$1=W800 to US$1=W1040. Significantly more than the currency change.

Also, previous comments about the Middle East not always true - if I went back to the school I was working at in Saudi Arabia five years ago - I would now be earning about US$5000 more per year. Not a bad increase.

But, like any job, if you stay on the bottom rung - you're going to get burned. If you have stayed in the profession a while you should be moving UP to better and better positions. If you are not moving up - you should be moving out.

[moonraven]

The biggest problem, probably, is that while demand for EFL teachers is growing--it is growing at a slower rate than the pool of prospective teachers.

With everybody and his dog now offering some kind of certification in 15 minutes for folks with no educational background or training in order to make a buck, pound, euro or whatever, there are more "teachers" to choose from.

And that means that while experienced and reasonably competent teachers are not going to work for almost nothing, inexperienced teachers will accept almost any salary and conditions with the idea of getting their feet in the door.

That obviously submits salaries and benefits to the law of gravity. And I suspect that the trend will continue. Just as money is devalued when there is an oversupply without any real backing, professions are devalued when they are taken over by an underclass of poorly paid and subskilled workers.

[Deconstructor]

I've had many European students (Swiss, German, Italian, French) and most of them not only didn't speak English well, but broke it beyond repair. At times they surpassed even the Koreans and the Japanese.

[Glenski]

biffinbridge wrote:

[moonraven]

They sure do make the situation worse, Glenski. But what are you going to do about it?

As I said in my previous analysis, the trend will continue.

It will not bottom out until employers figure out that hiring from the bottom of the barrel ultimately hurts their bottom line.

IF they figure that out....

[Moore]

In terms of wages I think the answer is to go for private lessons: you can charge a lot more when you�ve been recommended by a student - if you�re any good as a teacher you�ll get this.

I agree that the basic hourly wage for "business" classes has remained more or less frozen from when I started a decade ago, at about the ten pounds/fifteen US dollars/euros level.

The only way to increase your wages and job security, in my opinion, is to stay in any given country for several years: this gives you the benefit of learning the language (useful when/if you go home) which gets you better quality and better paid teaching jobs, and also it opens up other job opportunities outside teaching work. Wages for newbies in any country will always be lower.