Job Discussion Forums

[Skibz]

I vote GVO (Global Village ) for several reasons.
1) Money. They pay the lowest. We're talking 400nt per hour with promises of pay reviews. My rate was raised to 420 per hour after 1 year. Also they won't pay for anything else. Not The ARC administration or the medical costs. They won't pay you on national holidays. They don't provide any paid holiday time. They won't pay for visa runs. They don't pay for your return ticket and they don't pay any end of year bonuses.
2)Schedules. I estimate about 500 unconsulted schedule changes in the 2 years i worked for them. Most entail extra work and hassle, paying taxi costs as you try to find branches you've never been to. And often working for half pay. They have a clocking card system and if you're 1 minute late for your class then you're on half pay for the whole class.
3) Job satisfaction. basicly you read through a 2-3 page article and then you're expected to kiss their a###s for the rest of the lesson. so job satisfaction is pretty much zero.
4) Teacher support. Pretty much zero. Staff are barely civil and somtimes downright rude. Any problems, its your problem. I never heard a word of appreciation in 2 years. Also they won't support you in any dispute or complaint against you, however unfounded.
One thing in their favour is that they will take retirees, so if you're a retiree it might be an option, otherwise it could be your worst mistake in Taiwan.

[clark.w.griswald]

I think that you might be right in your suggestion that GVC is the worst.

I have never understood why people actually choose to work for them. They pay a pittance, and according to your post they don't have much else going for them either.

I understand that some want to teach adults, but Davids, Milton, or even Wall Street offer a better deal than GVC.

[markholmes]

So the question really is why did you stay two years with a company that pays at least 20% lower than their nearest competitor?

[Skibz]

I knew someone would ask me that, yeah i feel pretty stupid in retrospect.
But at the time i decided to finish out the first year for the sake of my resume ( the last 2 jobs i didn't finish the year for various reasons). Then i believed their story of a major pay hike after the first year, so i didn't have another job set up when it came to signing on for another year. Also i was always short of money which meant i didn't have a lot of options. And finally you get involved with some of these students you're teaching so......
Stupid!! Yeah, i have to admit that.

[clark.w.griswald]

Don't feel too bad. It is much easier to stick with a job than it is to uproot yourself and find something new. There are your students, work mates, and even just the convenience of knowing where you need to be each day, where to eat, and how to travel etc.

In retrospect I guess that it seems like a bit of waste knowing that you could have been earning a lot more elsewhere, but you must have been happy enough there to have stayed for a couple of years. It could have been worse. You could have jumped ship mid-first-contract and found yourself out of pocket a penalty and in a job that promised a lot but delivered nothing!

[Skibz]

Your right that the devil you know is sometimes better than the devil you don't know but that was the job that promised a lot and delivered nothing.
I should have known from the start when they cost me 15,000nt because they failed to prepare my visa extension papers in time forcing me to make another visa run.

Comment by GVO student.
I was discussing an article on racial equality one time with my students and asked one of them if there were many black teachers in GVO.
He laughed and told me that there were no black teachers in any of it's branches and there had never been a black teacher in GVO. He seemed to think it was common knowledge.
I don't know if it's true.