Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Mr. BlackCat]

YBM is a monolith company, which in our field generally means stability. I don't know what specific school or type of school your 'friend' (it's you, isn't it?) is looking at. But as long as it's not a franchise it should be alright.

I'm working at a YBM ECC right now, and although there is always room for creative Korean interpretation of promises, its good. My supervisor is cool, the other teachers are good, most gurantees were met at some level. But no matter what, it won't be nearly as good as they say. More hours, more responsibilities. At least that's my experience.

[bellum99]

The truth is that a large franchise or corporate school will do whatever they want. They don't really fear the labor board and they know they can another teacher in a second. You are expendable in every sense of the word. It can be good and it can be bad.
YBM has a bad reputation for screwing people around and it is well earned. If it seems good and you can finish the terms of the contract then sign with them. If you don't know if you can finish then don't sign because you should finish the contracts that you sign.

[rmparent]

I worked for a YBM ECC company-owned school for two years and I never had a big problem. Sure, there were little disputes here and there about lesson planning (coming in 2 hours before the first 3 months to write up your lesson plans) but all in all it was a good place to work compared to the other places that my friends were teachers. I won't mention the schools but I'll say that one of them starts with a W and ends in onderland. We were always paid on time by the company and the payments were never late.

As for the housing, I opted to go with the no-housing route to live closer to Gangnam. I was given 10 million won in key money and a 400,000 won monthly housing allowance. The key money was interest free but I was told it wasn't a year or two ago.

A friend of mine works at a franchise ECC in Kyunggido and they make him come in at 10 am and he leaves as late as 9 sometimes. He got paid 100,000 won more but who wants to work those crazy hours?

The only thing I didn't like about the contract was the 200,000 won they deducted off my first 3 paycheques for a housing deposit. I did get it back at the end of the contract but it kind of sucks when you have to pay that when you just start your job.

All in all, pay's not spectacular (1.8 for first time teachers) but working less than 25 hours a week gave me alot of free time. The thing is everyone's an employee at the school including the manager because the company owns the schools so there wasn't any trickery. This is just my experience. I know some people who work at Songpa ECC as well (another company-owned school) and they never had any problems neither.

[cdn_guy7610]

Actually, my school is looking for a couple of new teachers, one starting in March and one in April. If anyone is looking and is interested in teaching adults, I would suggest you look into it. The split shifts suck, but I think the adults are worth it. There are a few middle school classes, but the majority are adults. There is also overtime here, so if you want to learn some extra money the the normal basic rate for the 30 hours a week, then this might be an opportunity for you. The Korean English teachers have pretty good conversation abilities too. That was a nice change from my old academy. I noticed that the academy put up a post on Tuesday, Dec 13th, not sure if anything more recent is up.

I really haven't had any serious complaints, other than the normal minor problems that pop up, but those are usually fixed. No problems with pay. The bosses are all pretty good. We are having a nice year end party tomorrow night, so that should be fun. Back in October, the owner took all the teacvhers to Sockcho and Seorak mountain for a couple of days to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the academnies. They have 3 of them here in Suwon, one near Suwon station, one in Namoon and a Japanese/Chinese campus also near Suwon Station. So he took all the teachers and staff on the workshop. 2 hour speech and the rest fun and drinking. A good time. No idea how often they do it, but they have done it a few times.

So if you are thinking about teaching adults, I would recommend it. It definitely is a nice change from teaching kids. Many of the teachers either come back or extend their contracts too. This is only my opinion of the school. There are a total of 5 foreign teachers here.