Job Discussion Forums

[JoshuaJ]

I am planning to get my ToESL Certificate to teach in Spain. Should I be paying the likes of $900 for this certification? Oxford Seminars is the agency.

[R McKinley]

I think if you look time vs cost, it really seems expensive. I did an accredited four week course that had 8 hours of teaching practice classes and in relative terms is at least twice as cheap as the one week Oxford Seminar course. I was also working within a week of finishing the course.

Robert

[tw]

Beware of Oxford Seminars job placement service for its graduates! You are better off finding a job yourself. I activated my job placement service in May and the so-called coordinator never took the initiative to contact me other than to confirm that she had received my activation and later, the documents needed to process my case. I was told a recruiter had been working on my behalf to find me a job but I never heard from this recruiter, or any others that the coordinator later told me she had given my documents to. When I e-mailed her, she told me that because (1) I was not a university degree holder and (2) because of my Chinese background the recruiter was having a difficult time finding positions for me. She also used this excuse that because I had "insisted" on working in Dalian it made things more difficult. That was of course a lie because I had only said that my preferance was Dalian, but never did I say Dalian ONLY. As for the no-degree and Chinese-face problems, I received plenty of job offers from my own job search and even had to turn down a few contracts before deciding on well-paying job in a northeastern Chinese university.

The Oxford Seminars course is useful for anyone without any teaching experience. To me it was just spending some money to buy a piece of paper in order to increase my marketability.