Job Discussion Forums

[khmerhit]

Someone in the marketing side of tings was telling me that he thinks the ESL industry will slow down over the next ten years. Too many players in the pond, he says.

To give an example, a decade ago there were about 6 schools in our fair city. Now there are about 150, and not all of them are going survive the year.

Does anyone have an informed opionion about this?

yours inquiringly (because inquiring minds need to know)
Khmerhit

[Lanza-Armonia]

I damn well hope not. I planned to make a career outta this!

Maybe in Korea/Japan where the market is saturated/Huge turn over, it's going to be less ans less appealing.

I haven't gotta clue.... Someone answer quick

LA

[Wolf]

My guess is that things will slow down sooner or later in East Asia anyway. Most of the students in this regoin study either because they think English is cool, or because their government tells them to, or for other frivolous reasons.

Sooner or later people who really don't need to study will stop putting in the time, effort, and money of learning EFL.

In the private sector of Japan, I noticed that a lot of my students were only studying because "it's cool" or because they wanted to vacation in Hawaii for a week someday. Well, that's nice, but buying lesson packages from eikaiwas (private langauge schools) is really expensive. Sooner or later I see the eikaiwa trend dying, espeically if Japan's economy continues to sink.

Korea's hogwan system will probably not maintain its status quo forever either. From what I can read (and what I hear from teachers who've been there), I doubt that hogwans are much more sucessful at creating actual English speakers out of their students than the public schools are. It's probably a bit better than the public shcools, but does it really justify the huge cost in time and money?

In China people study English because their government told them to. Okay, that's a gross oversimplification, but I have seen many examples of such people. I teach them now. Oh, and because of that sucessful Olympic bid and WTO membership. Those seem odd reasons for an individual to learn English, but those are the responses I most often hear. Well the Olympics are a very pretty event that lasts for only 16 days, and some parts of China are 2000-3000km away from Beijing and aren't likely to be directly affected. Likewise, at this stage in the game, I'm guessing that there are more English speakers being trained in China (or at least in my region of China) then there are jobs where people will actually need such skills. There are only so many foreign firms in China, and many come from places like Hong Kong (hey, CCTV said it, not me), Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. I doubt that EFL skills would be high on the list of skills that Chinese people working for such companies would need.

That all being said, I doubt that there will be major changes anytime soon. There is a lot of inertia to overcome, so to speak. But my guess is that in a generation or so there will be fewer EFL jobs in such places.

[James_T_Kirk]

Here's my uneducated guess: over the next 10 years, things might slow down, but not considerably. However, over the next 20 to 30 years, things will possibly slow down dramatically the in the ESL industry. That being said, who really knows? Today's stable, secure job skill is quite possibly tomorrow's worthless job skill. For example, take IT jobs in the United States. 5 to 10 years ago, getting into IT in the United States was the smart thing to do. These days, IT people are struggling to find jobs in the U.S. because a) the market is saturated, and b) many of these jobs are being outsourced overseas. I think if you are a qualified teacher, you will always be able to find work teaching English. The working-vacation backpacker types might be in trouble, but the individuals that are making a career out of ESL should always be able to find job opportunities. I wouldn't stress over it Khmerhit; do what you like, because there is no sure thing when it comes to careers.

Cheers,
Kirk

[waxwing]

I won't be putting on any bets against demand for English in Russia and China over the next 10 years or so.
Whether much money can be made out of it is another matter though. This is education after all

[ls650]

[Eijse]

...

[leeroy]

As has already been noted, the genuine demand for English (by that I mean people who will actually need it to use, be it in their job, socially or whatever) makes up a fairly small percentage of English language students worldwide.

The world is not globalising at the rate that people think. Most business will continue to be done domestically, and most Chinese people will never have to speak to a native English speaker in their lives. I suspect that the East Asian obsession with learning English is a fashion, and given their inherently lamentable language learning abilities, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they gave up soon.

In a way, I hope they do. That way there will be less Shin-Jungs and Xiao Chens cluttering up the classroom with their mute, spirit-crushing dullness and a few more Europeans and Latin Americans who, along with having personalities, usually have far more genuine reasons for learning English in the first place.

That's how it is for me in London anyway...

[sidjameson]

Interestingly I feel people in Japan have realized that just being able to speak English isn't good enough to get a job. Experience too suggests to me that there are plenty of people here that have aquired good language skills, women especially, but have never been able to use them in a professional capacity. Much better to be a qualified whatever with no English than a damn good speaker of English but with no qualifications.
This though hasn't seemed to surpress their almost perverse desire to keep many a useless twit gainfully employed by having them teach (cough) them English.

[gugelhupf]

I can see both sides of the argument so far. As others have said, in a way I hope that language learning for "fashion" does decline, although I have not as yet encountered this myself. I have heard of other wishy-washy reasons for students attending English classes not least of which is the trend for concerned Muslim parents to view it as a way of keeping their teenage progeny from spending the time getting up to more serious mischief in the evening.

The use of the word GLOBAL in terms of the ESL market is perhaps key. I can see the demand for ESL becoming satiated in some of the more developed East Asian countries but I wonder if the focus will not then shift elsewhere in the region? I noted recently that one of the bigger Indonesian universities has begun to insist that graduates must achieve a TOEFL score of 400 or over - presumably in all disciplines. This is just one tiny example among many.

Where I do predict continued growth is in ESP/EAP teaching, which is a niche market that the big players - as they are currently structured - are poorly equipped to dominate.

[Roger]

In China, TEFL will soon be replaced by - ask Dan: working out. That's the next new wave, and people aren't going to spend their hard-earned dough on TWO relatively useless pastimes!
Chinese are rather fickle and long-term planners!

[Cleopatra]

Interesting post.

Predictions are made to be wrong, but I would say that the worldwide EFL market has reached - or is now reaching - its peak and will slowly decline thereafter.

It's not that I think english will stop being the world language - that's not going to happen - but that the market is approaching saturation point. The last decade has seen the opening of two major markets - China and Eastern Europe - and they have both (maybe not China just yet) pretty much levelled off in terms of demand. Western Europe is full of EFL schools which are barely profitable, because the competition is so fierce.

As earlier posteres have said,many, perhaps the majority of people learning English really have no pressing need to do so. As time passes, perhaps the fashion for English will wane.

In any case, as I said before, I really don't see where any new markets for EFL are going to come from.

[dmb]

So what would you do if the bottom fell out the EFL market?

[ls650]

[gugelhupf]