Job Discussion Forums

drifter13 · Joined: 27 Mar 2007 Posts: 124 Location: Fujisawa

Children's Language Education Department
OWLS Co., Ltd. (One World Language Services)
8F AIM Bldg. 3-8-1 Asano, Kokurakita, Kitakyushu

Anyone know about this school? My friend got an offer for an ALT position there and wants to know if anyone knows anything?

robertokun · Joined: 27 May 2008 Posts: 199

OWLS is a dispatch company, not a school. The AIM building is where their office must be. Your friend will most likely be dispatched to various schools.

I talked to them a few years ago, and they told me that you must arrange your own housing, and I don't remember the exact pay, but it was below 250,000 yen. They might have been asking as low as 180,000.

Unless they are helping arrange housing, or your friend knows someone there, and the salary is the standard 250,000, it wouldn't be attractive to me.

Also, keep in mind that it is in Kokura/Kitakyushu, which is in Fukuoka prefecture, but is nothing like Fukuoka city.

matador · Joined: 07 Mar 2003 Posts: 281

Read a few negative postings 2 or 3 yrs ago. Best to use the search function.

ironopolis · Joined: 01 Apr 2004 Posts: 379

OWLS is one of two dispatch companies that have the contract to supply ALT's in Kitakyushu. I think one covers the east of the city, the other the west - not sure which does which.

I've known around 6 or 7 people who worked for OWLS, a couple of them may still do so, I'm not sure. All bar one were ex-Nova instructors, and of those, several remarked that they had actually got a better deal conditions-wise from Nova than from OWLS - hardly a great endorsement!! Bear in mind though, this was long before Nova ran into its well publicised difficulties and eventual collapse last year and that a few years ago, some people managed to do ok out of Nova.

The most recent OWLS salary I heard of was 230k. That was last year, and was a guy who'd been there at least 2 years, so a newbie's salary may well be less. I'm sure I remembering hearing that the contract did not include August and that only 11 months were paid a year.

Ditto the comment above about having to have your own accommodation. In fact, I'm sure this is one of the reasons why OWLS seemed to focus a lot of their recruiting on picking up teachers disenchanted with some other job, but probably sufficiently settled in the area for them not to need much help with that kind of stuff.

Kokura/Kitakyushu IS indeed very different from Fukuoka City. It's much smaller, and even more so than the statistics would suggest, as it's really 5 small cities stuck together and pretending to be a bigger one. Many expats there find it to be not a bad place at all, but don't mistake it for a big city.