Job Discussion Forums

[rafomania]

hey guys,
ok, am working in a private language school. great stuff. love the students, staff etc but the money is a bit naff. so im thinking, business english pays more. i know of a company, ici, who employs un chingo of teachers but are ther any more companys who hire for business eng paying around 100 pesos an hour. how about the unis? do they pay better than 50 pesos an hour.????

[Guy Courchesne]

[J Sevigny]

As far as I know, ICI is the best paying gig in town apart from private universities. There are a number of other schools trying to work the business circuit and offering similar wages to teachers but they don't offer a lot of hours.

I've heard that ICI's pay hasn't changed much because the school hasn't been able to negotiate higher rates with its biggest client, Hewlett Packard. The standard ICI pay is 100 for companies located close by, 120 for those a little farther away, and even higher for classes out in Tequila. Classes at the school pay 80 or 85 pesos, I think.

All things considered, the pay is good for Guadalajara. Plenty of teachers work 20-25 hours a week, primarily at the same HP plant so they can take home as much as 9,000 or 10,000. Those aren't el DF wages but we don't pay el DF rent either.

[asi va]

What exactly is "Business English"?

[Guy Courchesne]

[rafomania]

I�m about to get a contract here with a small company. No teaching agency invloved or middleman. Just me and the company. How much would you charge an hour? Close to 200 pesos?

[MELEE]

Are you going to be teaching 1 on 1, groups smaller than 8, groups larger than 8?

Charge more if it is going to be 1 to 1, and more if it is going to be larger than 8 (materials will cost more). You might want to charge for materials separately or ask them to give you access to a printer and copy machine on site.

I would try to find out how much the agencies charge companies and pay teachers and put your price right in the middle, so that you make more than the teachers who work for an agency and charge less than the agencies charge companies.
I don't know enough about the Guadalajara market to be more specific, sorry.

[rafomania]

Hey, well teachers contracted by agencies get about 120 pesos an hour. I�ve heard that these agencies charge between 200 to 300 an hour. So maybe charging 170 an hour to a group of 5 seems quite good. Am getting sick of the middleman making all the profits. Time to go independent..............................

[Guy Courchesne]

How are you going to bill them, if you don't mind my asking?

[Aabra]

If you want to give private classes in companies I would recommend putting a bit of effort into it and getting the classes yourself instead of going through a company like ICI. You can target businesses that are very close to where you live so you don't spend much time travelling and you'll make more money. If it's a 1 on 1 class I wouldn't charge less than $150 per hour. Don't forget it takes you time to GO there and it's extremely convenient for them to have classes right at their place of work. If it's a group then $180 or more depending on the size.

Always charge for materials separately. Students will leave and join the class quite frequently and you'll be losing a lot of money every time it happens if you don't charge them for the books.

[rafomania]

guy, I havn't the foggiest!!!!

[Sgt Killjoy]

If I recall correctly, and Guy can help out, if you want to get a contract with a company, you need to have your own company to contract with them. It does require some overhead. I look at doing this with a buddy of mine, but the hassles seemed to outweigh the advantages.

[Samantha]

If someone gets an FM3 Independiente for teaching, he is required to have a tax account and be able to give facturas, anyway. This shouldn't be very different or need that a formal company be established, therefore I can't think of much else in the way of overhead. He would operate as an independent contractor.

[Patrocleides]

Lately I've been reviewing my first efforts at initiating a "fluency in discussion" on a company intranet, and there seems to be a vast difference between helping bilingual employees working entry-level McJobs and tutoring middle management. It may be their ordinary employees' interests, their English experiences, their decisions abpit what to do with their English, but this bicultural corporate management seems bound and determined to make all their employees' language-related decisions for them.

Whether you write this off to American-style "Human Resources" micro-management or the "authority issues" which always seem to lead Mexican managers into confusing the authority of their positions with their competence in instruction, the result is the same. If the employees want to joke in English, the company shuts down the little site. If the company posts a "game," the employees ignore it. After all, posting Hangman, a game for twelve-year olds, is an insult to the intelligence of capable twenty-two-year old bilinguals, but it's a company initiative and the employees are to be allowed no initiatives of which the company doesn't approve. They won't even approve of an employee bulletin board.

Administrators who do have some security in their jobs seem to have much more liberty to decide what they need and want they want by way of English enhancement. I assume teachers who are interested in working in business will find much more satisfaction and profit in teaching the upper levels of the corporate hierarchy. The "class division" so apparent between mere workers and managerial positions just about cancels out any possibility that teachers trying to help basic bilinguals will get any co�peration from the corporation. They'll make all the decisions just to demonstrate they can, not because their decisions have any hope of being productive. If their policies failed before, particularly in slowing horrible and expensive attrition rates, they feel they need to do them some more. Authority trumps competence, management trumps individual initiative, every time--at least for entry-level positions.

As an experiment I gave this particular company a completely "pro bono" offer--they had nothing to do but open an intranet site they had opened (and shut) twice before. I felt I was lucky to escape without them giving me lectures on how to facilitate discussions in English. Their proposals were either non-existent or formulae for failure on the first day. They simply could not tolerate the possibility that employees might be able to use a "free" facility in their own interests without being micro-managed in every remark they might make.

It might be different in an ESL environment in the United States in which workers with no English have to learn as much as possible as quickly as they can, but, in Mexico with a supply of bilinguals looking at a bad job market and poor pay, the corporations are not going to pony up for anything or do anything else but chambiar their employees. The principle of making sure that employees have no options but those granted by the company enjoys complete sway. Even spending a few dead minutes killing boredom by reading others' remarks on their issues and experiences dealing with English has to have management monitoring everything. Had the employees encountered this when they first started in English, they would have learned as little as they could endure learning.

Control is everything here, the acquisition of competence an unexplained miracle. Again the solution seems to be a "Virtual English" environment with enough "open source" diversity in resources to enable bilinguals as much as students of English to make progress without benefit of commercial exploitation or corporate domination.

I'd look for something dealing with the upper levels of management. From what I've seen, I wouldn't waste too much time looking for a good job teaching ordinary employees. What a teacher does to teach well gets to be an inconvenience, an expense, and a threat to managerial authority. We all know the sort of problems Mexican managers have with that--and American corporations are rapidly following suit. No surprise that older American workers express much more satisfaction with their jobs than do young people who, now in their majority, express sharp dissatisfaction with what the job market has to offer them. Mexicans just accept it, accept that being micro-managed and "evaluated" can't be changed, and then move out as fast as they possibly can.

I suppose there are parallels to classroom teaching. Students stuck with some TESL expert in "classroom management" seem to hate it, suffer quietly, and leave. Adult bilinguals are often not so fortunate.