Job Discussion Forums

[teraysah]

Hi Everybody
Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated. I'm looking to teach overseas and I'm toggling between Kuwait and a couple of other countries. Would anyone out there happen to know what I could expect for pay and benefits with my qualifications?

I have a B.S. in Sociology but I've been teaching survival English and citizenship to refugees for over 10 years. I don't have a TEFL or TESOL certificate but I do have an ESL teaching certificate for the state of Arizona.

I'm also married to an Iranian. Would that affect anything?

[Sara Avalon]

It depends on what you want to apply to and how you go about doing it. Pay also depends on whether or not the employer thinks you're a native English speaker.

If you come to Kuwait and apply to a job here, you won't get the benefits you might from a recruiter: no insurance, paid travel expenses, housing, etc..

But if you apply from abroad, those are incentives they will throw at you to get you here.

I also have a Sociology degree and it hasn't been a problem getting a job with language or regular K-12 schools. Having experience is a plus, but don't expect it to land you more pay. There are teachers here who have worked for 8 years and still haven't seen a significant pay raise. They make just as much as a novice which is typically between 450-600KD/month.

But if you apply to HumanSoft or some other language institution and you don't look American, it doesn't matter if you can write a 1,000 word thesis on the political instability of Greece, you'll still get a non-native salary of 450KD as opposed to the native base of 750KD.

The university isn't much better pay wise, but I doubt you can get a job there without an MA regardless of the experience you've had.

750KD may seem like a lot of money at first, but if you have no housing or transportation compensation it's not a lot at all. A single bedroom apartment with no furniture can cost you 150KD/month. Add in the expenses for furniture, food, phone, internet, etc.. and there's not a lot left to save. My advice is to definitely check out other options aside from Kuwait.

Hope this helps.