Job Discussion Forums

[banbanzista]

any advice for finding a job with semi-decent hours? the job ads are all so vague....... is it normally possible to negotiate your schedule before accepting the job? if so, do employers keep their word? if they don{t, is there anything to be done?

cheers!

[denise]

If you do business English, there's about a 103% chance that you will get split shifts. Plus travel time to different companies. And maybe a lunchtime class in between the morning and evening sessions.

If you don't do business English, you may still get split shifts, or at least have a few breaks in between, but they will be more tolerable. In Japan, my university offered classes between 8am and 4pm. We all had four teaching hours, meaning the rest of the time was prep time, lunch time, etc. No traveling involved, and no ridiculously early mornings or late evenings. Even now, I've got office time in the morning, a four-hour break, and classes in the evening. All at the same university, though, so no travel time. It's really quite nice.

I hated split shifts when I associated them with travel time, 7am starts, and 9pm finishes. They don't always have to be like that, though.

d

[ls650]

I have a split shift here in Mexico: 8AM-1PM, a 3-hour break, and then 4PM-7PM.

Oh well, at least I don't work weekends!

[Chris_Crossley]

Split shifts are very much the norm whenever one works for a private chain language school like, for example, EF English First, on whose behalf I worked for two years.

The split shifts were on Mondays to Thursdays (never worked Friday evenings, as I recall... ). I had to work 9:00-11:15 AM and then 6:30-8:45 PM in the classroom outside the peak seasons of the summer vacation (vacation for the kids and college students, not for the EF teachers!) and the Spring Festival when not only were there classes in the afternoon, but the morning and afternoon classes were actually longer, namely 9:00-12:00 and 14:00-17:00, plus the normal evening classes.

The rest of the time was supposed to be for preparation of lessons, although, given that EF does short courses, there was not all that much preparation to do once you had taken the same course more than a couple of times because you basically recycled the same stuff and used the same lesson plans....

I left my split-shift days behind when EF and I finally parted company, since the primary school I then worked at for a year does not make its foreign teachers work split shifts and the company I have been working for since February of last year does not make them work split shifts, either.

After all, there are no evening or weekend classes at all where I work!

[cam]

If you want decent hours and no split shifts then you need to keep looking for a job that provides decent hours. As long as teachers are prepared to work for chain schools which require split shifts then the schools will not improve the hours or working conditions. If everyone refuses to take on job with split shifts then the schools would be forced to improve the working hours.

[banbanzista]

so, i�m doomed.......well, thanks for the replies and from some of my favorite posters, too! you know who you are

[Malsol]