Job Discussion Forums

[Perilla]

Anybody have a ballpark figure on the number of TEFLers worldwide?

[tttompatz]

Ball-parking about 110,000 (legal teachers) in Asia.

30k in Korea
15k in Japan
10k in Taiwan
15k in Thailand (+ an estimated 15k more who are NOT legal)
20k in China (and climbing rapidly - estimated by SAFEA to exceed 50k within a few years)

20k in the rest of SE Asia (best guess - no data to back it up).

.

[Justin Trullinger]

I've often wondered- a little quick googling was unable to find a result of any stats on this, though. I suppose there's no quick and easy way to count us, at least not from country to country.

One (slightly sloppy) way to get an idea would be to look at visa issuance data. (Admittedly, this would have to be country by country.)

I've found some such data for Korea (where keeping records is pretty much normal) but can't find anything about other countries I've lived in. (Around 15,000 specific purpose foreign language instructor visas issued in 2006, last year I could find data for. This would be only part of the total, as some of us are considered "professors" or "trainers," which have separate visa categories, and some are married to locals. My guess might be that half the total English teachers here are on the E2 English teacher visa, making it maybe 30k in Korea. But there are a lot of assumptions made in getting to that guess.)

For smaller countries, just totalling up organisations known to hire foreigners, and how many, might work, but it's still a lot of guesswork. (I can't imagine more than a few hundred total in Ecuador, for example, but again, there's a big margin for error in that.)

Or would membership in professional organisations be one way to count? (Of course, many TEFLers don't join them.) How many TESOL members? Or IATEFL? Or...you see what I mean.

I'd be curious to know, but am thinking that even a ballpark figure would be hard to come by...

Best,
Justin

[Perilla]

Totally agree that coming up with an accurate figure is impossible, but I suspect someone or some org must have had a stab at nailing a rough figure at some point.

tttompatz' figures for Asia look fairly plausible. I can't find a figure for HK, so can only hazard a guess that there must be 2,000 but may well be as many as 3,000 here.

I'd be very interested to see how the figures stack up for individual European countries.

One reason I'm interested is in guesstimating how many more unemployed there'd be back in the English-speaking homelands if it wasn't for TEFL ...

[Teacher in Rome]

Looking at the visa figures wouldn't work for Italy - EU citizens don't need to apply for visas to work here.

But one way of looking at how many TEFL teachers Italy could support would be to look at population figures. As an example, in my area (about 50,000 inhabitants) I know of at least five teachers.

The population of Italy is just over 60 million. If we discard 20% of these as being over 65 years old (and less likely to be learning English) and then a further 10% of these as being say, under 5, then we could maybe say that 70% of the population is in the market for English lessons, which amounts to around 40 million.

If you have one teacher for every 10,000 inhabitants (that's maybe the number needed to provide enough work for one teacher - see my para above), then 40 million divided by 10,000 would be 4000 teachers.

Of those, many might only work part-time, or between October to June.

[Justin Trullinger]

Interesting thread- not sure how close it would all correspond with employment numbers back home- I'd think there'd be some elasticity in markets that would be hard to predict.

But have fun with it- let's see how good an estimate we can come up with...


Best,
Justin

[smithrn1983]

Excellent Fermi estimation, Teacher in Rome. That's probably the best way to estimate teachers worldwide, though we'd have to make a lot more assumptions concerning groups of people unlikely to be learning English (like subsistence farmers, etc.). I'll have to teach Fermi estimation to my students later.

[Sadebugo]

I remember my first teaching job in Ulsan, Korea back in '94. The only foreigners I saw were the ones I worked with and I never saw any Westerners outside of that. Then, around the summer of '95, I began to see a few new teachers hanging around the only McDonalds in the city. I later went back there to visit in '03 and you couldn't have swung a dead cat without hitting a teacher! There were always EFL instructors but I believe the profession really took off in the mid-90s with increasing demand in Korea and the awareness of the profession in the US/Canada. Anyway, I started EFL as a way to fill a gap between jobs and here I am many years later still doing it. The profession has definitely been good to me.

Sadebugo
MOD EDIT

[Perilla]

From TEFL.com:

"There are an estimated 40,000 language schools worldwide employing over 300,000 native English teachers every year. Most contracts are for 6 � 12 months and approximately 50% of the foreign language teachers leave after their contract to go back home or to another country."

Certainly a ballpark figure but the only attempt at a global one I've found yet. But this of course omits those working on government programmes, at international schools, universities, volunteer progs, etc.

So, somewhat over 300,000 in private sector schools? If anything that's probably a conservative estimate given a probable increase in schools since that assessment was made. In HK I'd say considerably more than 50% of TEFLers are employed outside the private sector, but that may be unusual. I suspect in Europe that the majority are employed in private schools.

Also interesting is TEFL.com's estimate that 50% of those 300,000 are what might be described as 'backpacker teachers', though please lets not reignite that particular discussion on this thread.

[posh]

In KSA, approx 2,000. Of which three are sane.

[steviok85]

Tefl.com:
An estimated 40,000 language schools worldwide.

10% of those must be in Warsaw.

Ok, an exaggeration, but this figure from tefl.com is way off the mark.

[sharter]

Too many judging by the krap wages in most of the world.

[Perilla]

It would be good to get a global breakdown of the number of TEFLers working in the other main sectors, then we'd get a clearer picture of what proportion of TEFLers are playing the long game. Tefl.com reckons about 50% of those in the private sector are temps.

I imagine most of those in international schools, on government programmes or in tertiary are more likely to be lifers.

[spiral78]

Tefl.com reckons about 50% of those in the private sector are temps.

I think in the CR (where I know a bit about the market on a continuing basis) it's more like 65-75% of those teaching in the private sector are temps. Admin and management staff are obviously more stable...

I remember some wild guesses about 8-10,000 EFL teachers in the Prague area in the heydays, but that sounds totally unreasonable even back in the day.

[Prof.Gringo]