Job Discussion Forums

SaudiExpat · Joined: 18 Aug 2010 Posts: 1 Location: Saskatchewan, Canada

Hi Everyone,

This is our first post on this forum. My wife and I want to teach English in Saudi Arabia. We understand the culture and lifestyle as we are Muslims but do not know much about the job market and what we can expect as far as salary.

Here are our qualifications:

1) My wife has a B.Sc in Nutrition and I have a B.A in Communications
2) My wife has two and a half years of teaching experience in the U.S & Canada and I possess one year teaching experience in Canada.
3) We are both working towards our CERTESL certification (250 hrs)
4) My wife has lived in Jeddah for almost 10 years (when she was a student), I have not lived in Saudi.

First question, based on this information, what kind of salary can we expect? Secondly, will we be able to leave in Saudi and save some money in the process (how is the standard of living as compared to salary received?)

Third, we are living in Canada - does anyone know of a good recruiting agency that we can contact that could place us with jobs in Saudi - if there are any recruiting agencies outside of Canada please let me know as well.

Look forward to hearing from everyone on this forum.

God Bless,

Saudi Expat

Sheikh N Bake · Joined: 26 Apr 2007 Posts: 1307 Location: Dis ting of ours

Everyone wants to jump the gun. I'd suggest paying your dues first with master's degrees in ESL/EFL (or at least Celta) if that's what you want to teach. Saudi is not a market for those with relatively low qualifications. Read the boards--those questions have been answered many, many times.

EnglishDoYouSpeakIt · Joined: 19 May 2009 Posts: 151 Location: Saudi Arabia

Salaam akhi, To ACTUALLY answer (at least one of) your questions, you can easily save quite a bit of your salary working in KSA. Your only real expense is food and 'stuff' in most cases. Housing and transportation is typically provided. (transportation to and from work, I mean.) For example, I knew a guy making 3 grand a month and was spending maybe five dollars a day. Had a wife and daughter back home and was living like a pauper for them.

These forum regulars here are often anal about people checking old posts. But they will spend the amount of time chastising as it would take to be helpful, it's confusing.

sheikher · Joined: 13 Jul 2009 Posts: 291

To the Saudi expatriate who confesses to no previous residency in Saudi Arabia, and who remarkably holds an undergraduate degree in Communications, I suggest he communicate with his wife who presumably has had ten years of experience living in Saudi Arabia.

Tip: Attempt to discover initially whether her experience was confined solely to that stretch of desert within the 4-metre-high walls of the campus she attended in Jeddah.

To ACTUALLY answer a question, yes, you and yours will be able to leave Saudi Arabia -- that is, if the Canadian embassy has not authorized your employer to confiscate your passport for his "safekeeping".

The salary you may save en route from your residence to Departures is your prerogative. I suppose it will be a significant amount, because rarely do taxi drivers avail passengers any opportunity to jump out to buy food and 'stuff'.

That's a gig I myself would like to engage in. Are you aware of any recruiters, be they domestic or international, offering salaries to individuals or couples whose duty it is to proceed through suburbia to an airport?

To "forum regulars" whose level of anal dysfunction may have qualitatively increased within the past few moments, I offer this consoling tidbit from a Canadian newsweekly publication distributed to subscribers whose postal addresses are also in Saskatchewan:

In 2006, Philip Babcock, a labour economist at the University of California, was surfing online when he came across a survey on the time use of undergraduate students at his school that shocked him. He noticed students were reporting perplexingly low studying times. Comparing his own university experience to his teaching experience over the past five years, Babcock had a gut feeling students weren�t studying as much, but remembers thinking, �people are always criticizing the generation that comes after them. Maybe they�re working their tails off.� So he decided to test the hypothesis. In the resulting study, to be published in the Review of Economics and Statistics later this year, Babcock and his co-author, Mindy Marks, found that since 1961, the amount of time an average undergraduate student spends studying has declined by 42 per cent, from 24 hours a week to 14. That drop is found within every demographic subgroup, within every faculty and at every type of college in the United States.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/09/05/the-decline-of-studying/

Sheikh N Bake · Joined: 26 Apr 2007 Posts: 1307 Location: Dis ting of ours

scot47 · Joined: 10 Jan 2003 Posts: 15343

I am thinking he is speaking the English nicely, isn't it ?

Never Ceased To Be Amazed · Posted: Tue Sep 07, 2010 1:34 pm Post subject:

Folks! Easy now! He is doing the needful to posting!

NCTBA

cmp45 · Joined: 17 Aug 2004 Posts: 1475 Location: KSA

hsm · Joined: 20 Aug 2010 Posts: 65 Location: Second Floor

scot47 · Joined: 10 Jan 2003 Posts: 15343

US$5 a day is doable. 18.75 Saudi Riyals will be enough to feed you. BUT what sort of life will you have on that ? See all the references on this forum to the "Fellowship of 500" or "The 300 Club". These are people who steal toilet paper from their work and scrounge lifts, newspapers and teabags from their long-suffering colleagues.

Many come to Saudi Arabia and are ensnared by the God Mammon, to whom they make daily sacrifices. Do you want to be one of them ?