Korean Job Discussion Forums

[karenology]

Does anyone know if this is possible? I've heard that if you don't finish a GEPIK contract, you're banned from working at any GEPIK school for a certain number of years, but wanted to confirm that this is actually definitely the case.

[jrwhite82]

The risk you run is getting a black mark on your file.

The woman who I replaced had gotten married and was moving to her husband's city. So she quit midway through a (renewed) contract after leaving proper notice. She was well liked and left on very good terms with her coteachers and administrators. She has since been hired at another GEPIK school.

Furthermore, she got this job by dealing directly with the school, not through GEPIK's central program.

Are you leaving the school on good terms? If they have anything negative to say about you, it will wind up sticking with you.

So basically, if you are leaving on good terms and are dealing with another school directly (as opposed to through a recruiter or with GEPIK) you should be ok. But you might run some risk of your new school finding out last minute what happened at your old school and canceling their agreement to hire you.

How many more months do you have to finish your contract?

[karenology]

Background info: I'm asking for my boyfriend, who teaches in another school. He's not on great terms with his school, it's in the middle of nowhere, and he is generally fairly miserable (most of the other teachers also appear miserable). A school in my town is looking for a new native teacher, and if they were willing to hire him I was wondering if that would even be possible. Neither of us are really interested in continuing to teach in Korea beyond the year.

I'm slightly nervous about posting this additional info...but then again, one of the major issues he's having is that hardly anyone at his school speaks decent English, so they probably won't be going around reading random foreigner forums.

[jrwhite82]

So he would also not complete the second contract either?

Another few things to consider is that if he has been with the first school for less than 6 months he will have to payback his airfare. Then if he does not finish his second contract he will have to pay his own flight. Third, he will not get any credit towards his severance (extra month pay) from his first job for quiting early. And if he doesn't do a whole year at school 2 he won't see a dime there either. So that's a potentional 5,000,000W in tickets and severance pay you're losing.

I forgot to mention, the woman I mentioned before switched to an F2 visa so she no longer required a release letter to deal with immigration. It is usually GEPIK policy to not write release letters. Add on that he is not on good terms with the school and you can basically kiss that good bye. Which means he will need to do a visa run to Japan. The new school may or may not be willing to pay for a visa run. So there is some big financial and logisitical risk you run by going down this course.

[karenology]

He would finish his second contract...though I guess I'm not sure how the airfare reimbursement would work. I'd probably try to stay a few extra months at my current school, since I started at an odd time (they've done this before with previous native teachers). I'm anticipating he'd have to make a visa-run to Japan, but we were planning on visiting Japan sometime anyways.

[ttompatz]