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.

[Gregor]

tedkarma's right. Wages/salaries are not going to get any better for entry-level positions. You need to position yourself higher and higher.
If you do a year in this country, then a year in that country and on and on, you are keeping yourself at the bottom of the ladder.
If that's what you want to do, that's fine, but be aware of what you're doing. TEFL, as a career, works like any other. Find a place where you can settle down and work your way up. Get a DOS gig. Or something. Even just staying as a teacher, in the same school, should get you pay increases. If not, make yourself known in the community and find a school that will hire you away.
I've been in China long enough now and am well enough known that the school where I work gets students who want to be in MY classes. As a DOS that's a hassle, because I don't HAVE that many classes. But I'm valuable to the school, and they pay me QUITE well.
I could open up my own school here if I wanted, and attract a really good base of students - enough to pay me more than I make working for someone else, and that would be just doing classes out of my home, on my own.
I'm not doing this, but I have done it on a small scale. If my wife and I wanted to settle down and commit to staying here, we'd have a pretty good base of students, from the get go.
I'm not ready to do that, personally. But I can't complain. I'm a good teacher, and students come to me because of that. Therefore, I can charge a livable amount of money, either as a salary, or as a freelance teacher.

[merlin]

[Gregor]

There ARE other functions that a DOS can perform other than curriculum design.
Where I work, I generally employ first timers, but the clientele tends to be VERY picky and want a good and experienced teacher. I do a lot of teacher evaluations, workshops, on-going training, and so on, in addition to the scheduling of classes and promotional activities. On top of that, I teach a fair number of hours. We also have outside classes and I have to form relationships with those clients, as the guy who goes out and GETS the contracts doesn't know what it is that we do, or are capable of.
In addition to that, I do orientation meetings with new students and their parents, telling them (the parents) how they can help their kids with their English studies even though they don't know English themselves.
I also help the newbies with hassles relating to their adjustment to life in a foreign country, make sure the sales staff know their jobs and continue to DO them, and act as mediator for disputes and confusion between the local staff and the foreign staff.
I also recruit, hire and (if necessary) fire teachers. I cover for sick and vacationing teachers, and over-all, I'm the foreign face of the school in ads and in the community.
THIS is a modern DOS job. It requires experience teaching ESL, experience and savy in the local market, and an understanding of local custom, as well as at least a passing understanding of the local language.

This all is what I was refering to when I talked about making yourself valuable. I get a good salary for this job. Where can I go from here? That's a whole different post, and at the moment, it would be conjecture. I'm not sure. But as it is, I make enough money to have some satisfaction in that regard(if I can count on at least tolken salary increases as I go along), and I have enough to have bought a home, and I can raise a family if I wish, and I could even buy a car with the cash I have in the bank, if I and my wife wanted to do so.
In short, I disagree, merlin. Textbook series freed me up to DO this job. I wouldn't have time for it otherwise.

[EnglishBrian]

Tend to agree with Gregor here. DoS these days is a director. Much as a conductor leads an orchestra - you wouldn't expect them to write the music as well. Everyone I've met in TEFL, be they experienced teachers or DoSes have led me to feel that course writing is an entirely different skill and job to teaching or DoSing.

When the DoS is actually generating the course they're indispensable and their contribution shows up day by day. The work of DoSes now is no less important but it shows up more gradually and subtly so in the eyes of tight or short sighted Directors they aren't as highly valued.

[Gregor]

Yes, I would agree that what my boss is spending on me he SHOULD be spending on marketing. When my contract is up and I have things smoothed out for him more or less here, I will even make that suggestion to him. I can get the school run well, but they need to attract new students, open more diverse classes, and so on. They need someone who knows how to market the great and beautiful school, once I manage to make it so that there IS one here.

[EFLtrainer]

[Cardinal Synn]

[quote="merlin"]