Job Discussion Forums

[Nomad79]

What types of jobs can I get in a mid-sized to large cities (I'm thinking Beijing, Shanghai or somewhere down south--hate winter, but willing to deal with it for Beijing but probably not otherwise) with these qualifications:

BA in Psychology from a well-known US university
CELTA
Lots of experience teaching classes and one-to-ones in New York and Japan, and also online
Former newspaper reporter with lots of published articles in small publications
Freelance writer-editor
My experience has been primarily with adults and some older children.

What types of schools and salaries am I looking at? Would I stand a chance of teaching in an international school or a large university? Could I teach writing or English lit or something aside from EFL?

No flamers, trolls or snark attacks please.

[johntpartee]

Are you white? Is your passport from the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand? If it's "yes" to both questions, you're in.

Oral English mostly, possibly writing. ANY English classes will probably require lots of oral English teaching, regardless of what the class is called.

[Miles Smiles]

Shoot for a university in Jiangsu to start. You'll be looking at about 5,500 rmb per month. If you anticipate a long stay, you can move on to private language mills after you get your feet wet in the university.

*Hint* Turn the one-on-one experience into group teaching. I wouldn't push to teach writing. Even with really good English majors, it can be a struggle to get them to write intelligibly even if they're capable of it.

But DO look at schools that offer the students English major programs. Teaching English majors can be a blast. Teaching non-majors can be very difficult, especially if the school doesn't have a curriculum worked out.

[Miajiayou]

Both experience and certificates are not valued very highly in China, it seems, especially if that experience was gained in other countries. Many times, the upper salary range advertised by a university is only if the candidate has a PhD (which can be legitimately funny, depending on the range). Other times, you may be able to negotiate for much more than what is advertised based on your ability to teach more lucrative courses (IELTS, TOEFL, computer stuff, etc).

You could snap up a university job for 5,500 quite easily in the more developed provinces, as Miles said. Unfortunately, it seems that more and more schools are requiring their FTs to teach 18-20 hours a week for that base salary, rather than the 12-14 hours a week that was standard when I first started. That makes it a pretty poor deal. China is not a shockingly cheap place to live anymore.

You won't have a chance in international schools but you might enjoy an "international school." Plenty are cropping up, as fancy schmancy private schools that don't adhere to the same standards as international schools but tend to pay well. Enough people are rich in places like Jiangsu now (try Wuxi, especially) that such places aren't filled with the WORST students anymore. Still pretty bad though.