Job Discussion Forums

xpatmatt · Joined: 07 Jan 2011 Posts: 3

Hi Everyone,

My name is Matt Gibson. I'm a journalist working on an article about teaching agents in different countries around Asia.

In Taiwan (where I live) agents traditionally have had a bad reputation for being untrustworthy, greedy, dishonest, etc. However, it seems that this has been changing in recent years.

Since I have little experience with agents, I am looking for teachers' opinions about agents so that I can find out what the general attitude towards them is in different countries.

I'd like to know:

1) Do you feel that most agents are honest?

2) Do you feel that agents work in the best interest of teachers?

3) Do you feel that agents contribute to lower overall teaching wages by trying to convince teachers to accept less pay (so that they can make more money)?

Also, I'd really like to hear about anyone's personal experiences with agents, or anything else that anyone has to say on the topic. My article will be based mainly on the opinions of the teachers who respond to my post.

If you would like your opinion included in the article (although I can't guarantee it will be) please include the following information about yourself:
Name (just a first name is OK)
Home country
Country you teach in.
This is just so that I can attribute quotes to people, for example, Beth, a British English teacher living in Japan said, ....

If you would like to contact me privately about this, I can be reached at ‪xpatmatt[@]gmail.com‬.

Thanks very much for reading!

Best,
Matt

Rooster_2006 · Joined: 24 Sep 2007 Posts: 984

yamahuh · Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 1033 Location: Karaoke Hell

I've only used an agent once and must say that all in all it was a positive experience.

I felt that he acted in our best interests and honoured his promises to us. Along the way he cost us a bit of money by giving us some advice that proved to be inaccurate but (and this is where I really give him credit) he paid us back out of his own pocket for the money we'd had to spend due to the advice we received - not just from him, I might add.

As my experience is limited to the one time I can only say that I felt like I was treated fairly and even though we only used him once I thought he acted in our best interests. He even went to bat for us with the school on a couple of occasions when push was heading for shove.

From what I've seen of the rest of the 'breed' we lucked out. Most of the other agents we've been contacted by have been far too eager to push us into jobs that didn't suit, in locations we didn't want to be, teaching hours that we didn't want - which is why we've only dealt with the one.

(Edit) Oh yeah - we were making a reasonable wage for the location and hours we were teaching too.