Job Discussion Forums

[bish]

I maybe having a telephone interview with GABA next week with a view to coming to Tokyo later in the year. I can't find a great deal of info on them other than from the website. I've actually heard good things but am wondering if anyone has more information about them please?

[Wintermute]

A lot of my friends work for GABA. You are essentially a sub-contractor for them. I have heard that there are some full time positions (for managers and trainers) but most teachers are offered lessons by the month. Also, your schedule constantly changes - sometimes you will be busy, other times not. Popularity plays a part, the more the students like you the more lessons you will be offered. Simply put the pay sucks. They pay you 1400yen for 40mins (the ads say 2100-3000 but that is for an hour of work). Not bad if the hours are guaranteed but you can do a lot better working private lessons at 3000-4000yen an hour. If you treat GABA as a casual job then it will meet your expectations but as for actual full time employment I would look elsewhere.

[Apsara]

You will hear a lot of negative stuff about Gaba, but a lot of it is based on how it was under the original management, and at that time (about 2001-2004) much of it was deserved. For several years now the company has been under new management and the difference shows. I worked for them under the old management 2002-2004 and last year went back to them for a few months while I was having a lull in my usual job and needed to make up the income. I was quite surprised by the changes.

One negative would still be the fairly low pay at entry-level- it will go up from �1400 per 40-minute lesson to �1500 per lesson from April. There is a 5 minute break between lessons so that comes to around �2200 per hour, which actually isn't bad these days as the pay from other eikaiwas and dispatch companies has gone down. They also now offer incentives from time to time for working at peak times, and a tiered bonus system for teaching over a certain number of lessons per month- if you work a full-time schedule this can be up to �15,000 extra per month.

There is also the option of doing extra training modules which allows you to move up levels into the next pay bracket- only about �150 per lesson increase per level but that adds up after a few lessons. When they introduce new texts they now give out an information pack and a quiz on the contents and if you hand in the quiz on time you get a few thousand yen extra in your next pay as an incentive.

The 3-day initial training is unpaid, which may be an issue for some.

Most students select their teachers for their upcoming lessons online, although some just let their teachers be chosen randomly. This means that if you are popular you will get a fuller schedule. If you have no student booked for a lesson then you don't get paid for that time but are free to leave the building/ go home if it's your last lesson. You can check online from home how many of your lessons for the day have filled. I always had a 95% full schedule, even when I first started back, and I didn't see any teachers at my school who had really empty schedules.

One issue I had with the place was the 5-minute break between lessons- not really enough time to get to the toilet and back. I worked no more than 4 lessons at a time without a break as I didn't wait to be sitting there in pain trying to hold on.

For me far and away the main positive point to Gaba was the complete freedom to choose my own schedule- mornings, afternoons, evenings, any day of the week, weekends, 2 hours a day, 8 hours a day, it is completely up to you, although if you choose to work in the afternoons for example you may not get such a full schedule. This allowed me to fit my Gaba schedule around the schedule for my other job and increase and decrease lessons as I needed to. I mostly worked 4 hours or so in the morning and mid-afternoon with occasional evenings on other days.

The schools themselves are beautifully decorated- totally unlike the stained carpets, rock-hard chairs and plastic booths at Nova. The students are paying quite a lot so tend to be well-motivated and are mostly quite interesting to talk to- if you put in a schedule of 12+ lessons a day it may well turn into drudgery, but I used to do 4- 7 lessons a day, 4 or 5 days a week and found it quite painless. Well over 50% of the students at the school I was at were higher level. The job is pretty much entirely stress-free.

Under the old management Gaba was banned from sponsoring visas for a while due to having done something dodgy but they are now able to sponsor again.

Anyone who has extensive EFL training or is interested in a long-term career in EFL should probably look elsewhere, because it is cookie cutter stuff, but otherwise it is not at all a bad way to start off in Japan, with the flexible schedule in particular giving you opportunities to travel and do other things that you may not get working elsewhere. It is great as a part-time job if you have other things going on.

I probably sound like a Gaba recruiter, but I swear I'm not, I just wanted to head off all the negative stuff that is usually dragged out by people who have never worked there or only know what the system was like under the old management.

[bish]

Thanks to both of you really helpful stuff. Any more comments from others would be much appreciated!

[BobbyBan]

What you do is you tell them when you can work and then your students can book you. If they like you then they are more likely to book you so it is a bit of a popularity contest.

The company isn't too bad but it's corporate ideology is a bit pretentious. There is a company jargon you learn in which you are not a teacher but an instructor and your students are not students but clients and you teach not in a school but in a language studio (or a learning studio, I can't remember). They seem pretty upfront about most things even to the point where they will admit that you're essentially getting screwed over with the low wage but what with the market being what it is there's not much they can do about it. You use computers in your lessons to record the lesson data and clients records and drills.

[Miyazaki]

[ghostrider]