Job Discussion Forums

[jotto]

I am attending the Trinity TESOL course in Oxford at the end of this month. When did you start applying for jobs? Before, during or right after the course? I know it probably varies, but how long after the course were you employed? Still haven't decided where I want to go yet. I guess that would help but I figure there are going to pros and cons to anywhere I go. From the sounds of it, all the sptting, staring, etc. in china sounds like fun . Thanks in advance.

[Chris_Crossley]

In my case, I did the Trinity College Certificate in TESOL over a period of 31 weeks (one Friday per week) at my local adult education college, so I certainly did apply for jobs during the course.

However, I imagine that you must be talking about an intensive course over, say, 4 weeks. It would always be a good idea to apply right from day one because four weeks are not a long time, and, if other posters' experience of this kind of intensive course are anything like the one you are going to have, you may have time for precious little else given that the workload will be so high for such a short course.

Your tutors will undoubtedly give you pointers as to how to apply for jobs, depending upon where you want to go and what sort of school (public? private? adults only? kids only? both?) you want to teach in. There will undoubtedly be a noticeboard or three with information about schools you can apply to, a number of which have rolling enrolments with no particular deadlines to meet. You may not necessarily have any ideas now about where you might want to teach after the end of your course, but I think it is fair to say that you and your fellow trainees will have plenty of ideas by the time you are even halfway through it.

I hope this helps. Good luck.