Vacancy: IH Tripoli (International House in Libya)

Would you like to work in Libya?

'Yeah, so what if it's a 'dry country,' where I can't get any alcohol? It's got the beach; it's in the Middle East region, so the pay's got to be good!'

Not at International House (IH) in Tripoli, Libya.

First, here's an excerpt from the USA Department of State's travel warning for the country of Libya:

 

 

 Second, here's an excerpt from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the UK:

 

 

 

 

 

Now, let me ask you again: Would you like to work in Libya?

'Ok, so it's dangerous. As long as I don't go out at night…or in the daytime unaccompanied…then, I'll be fine. The pay must be outrageously awesome if I'm going to teach English in a dangerous locale.'

Think again my friend. Here's the post from www.tefl.com

Besides the shared accommodation, the number of contact hours per week or the number of vacation days, the one glaring red flag to this whole operation must be discussed: the pay.

1,000 - 1,300 GBP / month? Are you insane? One could get a higher wage in Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia and not have to worry about being shelled or kidnapped by rebels!

I would not cross Libya off my list of places to teach in, but for companies like International House (IH) who are going to offer a deplorably low salary for risking one's life and limb to teach, no one should apply for this job.

Check the above mentioned countries for a better quality of life and pay. If you still want a Middle East experience, go with the Gulf countries as they are not in the midst of, nor have they just finished, a war. The pay in the Gulf is astronomically higher than this crap IH is offering.

How disrespectful to put such a low salary on my life! I'm worth…at least…twice as much!

In short, don't entertain even the thought of working for IH in Libya.  

Yanbu, Saudi Arabia from ESL Employment

This job review analyses the posting from ESL Employment. 

Let’s keep this short and sweet. This posting is best served to mid-level teachers with 2-3 years experience and a CELTA/ TEFL/ TESOL.

You might think the 6 month contract is an advantage. This way, you can get in, work, save some money, and get out of there in time before you lose your sanity.

No. A 6 month contract is not a good thing. 

You’ll be working – technically – illegally on a business visa. It is not the same as working on a resident visa. Why would Virtual Vision Solutions do that? Because it saves them money from paying and processing your resident visa and Iqama (Alien Resident Card.) And because it allows them to take further advantage of you, the employee.

 Because you’re working illegally, you have no recourse if they bring you to a labor camp and force you to stay there with 10 Bengalis and no kitchen or shower, claiming that is the furnished housing they claimed in the job advert. 

As well, they could force you to work extra hours and perform duties outside of the scope of teaching. Getting an exit/ re-entry visa won’t be possible – you’re stuck inside Saudi for the entire 6 months. As well, at the end of the 6 months, you will NOT get a severance pay, again because of working on a business visa.

Flights? Not mentioned. Employers are supposed to pay for your flights in KSA. If they expect you to pay, and claim to reimburse you, you’ll never get reimbursed.

What institute/ university/ company are you going to work for? ELC, but what does that stand for? Minor background about the company posted with the job would be helpful.

Not to mention you’ll be working in Yanbu, which makes Riyadh seem like Paris. The air quality is terrible up there, more conservative, and even less to do. But of course, you can always drink goat’s milk, eat figs and pray a thousand times per day.

The 13 – 14,000 SAR / month on offer here is the same as other job posts. Look for another job in Saudi with equal pay, furnished housing, transportation provided (or allowance) and a 12 month contract with severance...if you are so desperate for money you're eating your shoe.

But most definitely, not ICEAT at the Preparatory Year Programme at King Saud University.

Good luck to you. 

TEFL Internships in China

Read this job post in its entirety here at Dave’s ESL Café.

Ok, so at first glance, everything seems good. You, the new graduate who’s just received his/ her BA in whatever, decide to go into teaching. You’re serious about it, thinking it could be a worthwhile profession. But you don’t know the first thing about teaching English. So you browse Dave’s ESL Café, where you find the posting linked above. You send your CV (resume) and interview for the internship. Lo and behold, you’ve got the internship! But you have to pay the program fees! The what? That’s right.... surprise, surprise.

If I hadn’t done some snooping on the company’s website, TEFLinternships.com, I wouldn’t have uncovered the hidden little tidbits of information they were withholding from its prospective internship applicant.

You have to pay the program fee of: $888.

On the company’s website, TEFL Internships, it touts the TEFL certificate as something worthwhile. Instead, after researching, the certificate is more worthless than the paper it’s printed on.

The TEFL online teaching website, http://teflbootcamp.com/, promotes itself as being an international member of ACTFL, IATEFL and the College of Teachers. These are worthless assertions. Anyone with a credit card can join these organizations. By placing these organizations on their webpage, it’s leading prospective consumers to believe these are accreditation bodies. This TEFL online certificate is not accredited by the British Council, University of Cambridge, Oxford, hell- not even Kaplan! 

It is, however, accredited by the Better Business Bureau (BBB) which any company can get, but only if it honours its guidelines and pays the membership fees. The main guidelines are that members of the BBB don’t lie to consumers, disclose physical address of their company, and refund customers their money if customers aren’t satisfied. So not one – absolutely NOT ONE – educational body has accredited or endorsed the online TEFL certificate. Rubbish. Absolute rubbish.

Aside from this advertising which provides customers with an opportunity to misinterpret the institutional bodies as endorsers or accreditation bodies, the website looks so schlocky. The online 'class' was created by a single man (not the plural tutors the website would have you believe) with yes a Masters in Education and a PGCE in TEFL and with over 15 years of experience, but those qualifications alone do not warrant his ability to write meaningful teacher preparation textbooks. Instead, this fella created some e-books with little to no content inside them (I bought his TOEFL, TOEIC and IELTS test preparation textbook four years ago and found only content which could’ve been gleaned from a friggin’ Google search.)

Don’t waste your time with this company. Remember: never pay a recruiter for anything. Let alone the $888 this whack-o company is demanding to place you in an internship and give you a worthless online TEFL certificate.

And yeah you can find legit jobs on Dave's, but you have to sift through job postings like this. Don't take the job posting as absolute truth. Research by checking the companies involved websites. 

Stay far, far, far away from TEFLinternships!

Greenheart Travel Job Posting from TEFL.com (South Korea)

You can read this job post here.

Usually this company, Greenheart Travel, charges teachers for the program. However, for this job in South Korea teaching in public schools, there are NO CHARGES.

Greenheart Travel does offer a TEFL certificate, but I wouldn’t go for it. First, you’ll have to pay for it ($480), and I doubt the quality would be very good. Wait until you’ve worked two years in Korea, and then do the CELTA (Certificate of English Language Teaching to Adults). You don’t need any experience/ or any certificate to step foot inside a Korean public school classroom. The first week is difficult to adjust, but there are loads of resources available to help you online. Just do a Google search.

The one drawback to this post, and any teaching post in Korea, are the seemingly insurmountable hoops you’ll have to jump through in order to teach in the country.

The government now requires an FBI background check, which takes 3-4 months. And Greenheart Travel, nor does any employer in Korea, reimburse you for the cost.

A CLEAN CRIMINAL RECORD is a must. Just as the posting says, not even an underage drinking misdemeanor charge when you were 20 years old. The government of Korea is very restrictive and are just looking for an excuse to turn away a Waegukin (Korean word for ‘foreigner’.) The best teachers have made mistakes, but use them as a learning experience. Don’t even apply for a Korean teaching job if you have a questionable record. Apply to a different country that’s not as strict.

The compensation is similar to other good jobs on offer. With no teaching experience and no TEFL certificate, you’ll be on the bottom rung of the salary scale. Don't listen to the warnings: if you're savvy enough and careful enough, get some private tutoring on the side to supplement your income.

30 days of paid vacation is good to start with.

You’re not working in a Hakwon, or language institute, but a public school where you’re paid on time, and the working conditions can be predictable. (There are exceptions to this rule. If given the choice, I would choose a public school over a Hakwon any day of the week.) Furnished apartment, severance pay and flight allowances provided. Though you’ll have to ask in the interview with Greenheart Travel whether or not you’ll have to pay for apartment utilities.

Remember: You are using a recruiter. Make sure the contract you sign for Greenheart Travel matches the one you’ll sign at the public school on your first day. If they don’t match, or there are any surprise clauses that were suddenly written in, don’t sign and call the recruiter. Be firm with your public school employers. If they see you are weak willed, that your spine will break under their pressure, soon enough they’ll want you to work extra hours, possibly on Saturdays, teach a faculty member English for free, design textbooks etc. And then you’ll find yourself working 60 hour weeks at the same salary stated on your contract. If you don't mind being pushed around, then I guess you are a jellyfish. For others, don't let them take advantage of you because you are young and inexperienced. There’s nothing wrong with being assertive, but do it in a polite way.

For newbie teachers, give it a go. But don’t forget to ask some thorough interview questions. 

Video On-line Part-time Jobs B2Corea

You can read the post at Dave’s ESL Cafe in its entirety here. I do post the majority of it because this grates on my last nerve.

The whole posting reeks of being a start-up company that doesn’t know what they are doing. Let’s take a look to see why.

Aside from the hokey rhetorical questions at the beginning, the job – which means you, the teacher, don’t start getting paid until – April. April! That’s seven months of waiting to begin, and that’s being generous not counting the last three weeks of September.

The salary of 1.2 million Korean Won/ approximately $1,056 is to bait the teacher into applying for this job. In order to get that much money, a teacher must work 25 classes that are each 50 minutes long to get paid $13 for each contact hour. However, the students who take online classes have very little time in which to do so. Strictly speaking, if students even choose to take online classes at all.

Younger students go to Hakwons, or onsite educational institutes, to experience face-to-face interaction with native speakers. Their parents pay the money, so the parents make the choice where their child goes. There are benefits to blended learning, which includes online components, but if given the choice, parents will choose the onsite, face-to-face interaction of the Hakwon. Most importantly, if the kid is at a Hakwon, little Sun Woo is not in the house; it gives the parents a break from being parents. Like day care in a way.

Older students go to university or work. Studying and preparing for exams is a full-time job. And for those workers, they don't have as much time either. Koreans have an incredible (yet culturally mandated, as it would seem) work ethic of putting in 60 hours a week. If their boss is in the office, they don’t go home until Big Boss goes home. So that leaves little extra time for workers to study online. However, for one hour three times a week, it is feasible. Just getting enough students to equal out to 25 contact hours a week is a stretch.

Yet, going back to the problem of your, the teacher’s, salary. 25 contact hours is a lot for an onsite institution to offer its teachers. 25 contact hours on offer here by a NEW online ESL start-up company is going to be like climbing up Mount Everest without legs. Maybe not impossible, as a nice little Sherpa could have the will of Zeus and drag your sorry behind up the mountain, but I would not count on it. Don’t let this little carrot dangled in front of you obscure your logic.

As an aside…what are you and a student going to accomplish in a 15 minute class? I think this payment scheme was generated by a newly minted Economics undergraduate who just likes to crunch numbers and be entirely ignorant about the logistics of trying to introduce, teach and then review a lesson in that amount of time.

The Deduction Section is preposterous.

Over-sea transaction fee is for a wire transfer. 10% off your total payment if you request cash. And on top of all that, income tax if you are living and working in Korea.

B2Corea got the hiring steps all so, ever so ridiculously, wrong. You interview, go through 1-2 hour training, which to think that the software this company has is so complex and comprehensive that it necessitates 2 hours is retarded, do a trial lesson and then, only then, does B2Corea make a decision whether to hire you or kick you to the curb. It’s bonkers! A good company should: after the interview, decide to hire the teacher. That’s it! Don’t waste anyone’s time with training someone and a trial lesson.

Overall, B2Corea needs to rethink its business strategy. The amateurish-ness is so ungodly offensive, it reeks of Kimchi and Soju.

Don’t waste your time; research other jobs.

PS I hate when 'companies' have gmail addresses. If they were legit, they would have a website with a .com email address. 

English Language Instructor International Company for Education and Advanced Training (ICEAT)

Job posting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia here

The working day and work week is standard. 4 hours of office work is what you are supposed to do. I know a few teachers who worked at this university previously. The bottom line is that you are supposed to be in your office. However, you can do errands, go out for lunch or for a coffee during this time.

Additional cover duty was an issue. The teachers I knew complained about this a lot. Cover duty was on a rotational basis. Since there were 180 teachers on the payroll, teachers were scheduled to work 7:30 am - 5:30 pm about once a month. However, when a teacher did not show up for cover duty, another teacher was called in to cover for the cover teacher! Worse, the teachers that did not show up for cover duty received no warnings, no pay deduction, not even a stern talking to. Just something to keep in mind if you are thinking about joining this 'team.'

A great classroom environment? Could've changed in the last year or two. Teachers complained there were no whiteboards in their room, let alone projectors, or working computers. If the technology was in the classroom, there were technical difficulties or were not functioning altogether.

Cleaning crews rarely cleaned the rooms adequately. Trash being taken out and white boards being cleaned were never done. Rooms were never vacuumed. 

Student Background section is completely misleading.

They are not the best students you would find in Saudi Arabia. The really wealthy and smart kids study abroad. So what you've got are the bottom of the barrel. If these students really worked hard and wanted to make the most of their academic opportunities, they would've studied English more, paid for a tutor and passed the proficiency exam to allow them to study at the real campus of KSU.

These students are not motivated at all. They are not excellent in picking up the language. If they were, they would not be in the PYP.

A summarization of their behavior:

Rampant cheating during exams; talking nonstop in Arabic; lethargic and unmotivated to learn English.

Classroom management is a mountain for teachers to climb there.

 Compensation:

Salary is good to average, but nice to see they provide round trip airfare for you and 3 dependents.

End of service indemnity is pay for completion of the contract. Usually calculated at number of days worked. Somewhat less than  a full month's salary.

30 days paid vacation is nice in addition to the university approved holidays.

Verdict: only for the desperate.

KSU is a place only for the desperate. Ask yourself how badly you need the money. Remember you'll be working in Riyadh, not Jeddah, and not even closer to the Eastern Province where Damam is bearable if you can venture there. Riyadh is a giant dustbowl with not much to do if you aren't Muslim. Walking around the malls and getting drunk on the illegal hooch at the compounds is not very good for your health, physically or mentally. There are desert trips you can sign up for, but of course, it all depends if you like that sort of thing. Embassy parties are once a month, so you can Embassy hop to the different ones to get your drink on. Other than that, there's not much to do. Groundhog Day for 11 months? Can you handle it?  If so, then you will save money, but you have to weigh that against the boredom you'll experience.

This employer took my friends' passports two years ago. Most likely they continue doing that as is the unofficial custom of employers in Saudi. So that means no weekend trips to Bahrain for a booze fest on a whim. You'll have to apply to your employer to access your passport at least a week in advance to get an exit visa. All very much a very big pain.

If you have a Masters in English, Linguistics, Modern Languages or Education, look elsewhere. You can get more money and better benefits in Saudi. Or choose the UAE where it's still boring but they allow accessibility to booze, dancing, looking at hot girls wearing more Western style clothing. With an MA you can work in the universities in the UAE. Some very cush jobs available.

GOLDSTAR TEFL Recruitment/ Wall Street English

Here's a job posting found here

Analysis

Anything over 24 hours for the less experienced teacher is a sure fire route to teacher burnout. You don't want to be overwhelmed, get stressed, and contemplate fleeing the country in the middle of the night. It's a terrible way to begin your career. Even with the lesser number of contact hour option B, it's still going to take a teacher some time to get the gist of the lesson. Although, the posting says all lesson plans are prepared for you, more than 5 hours is necessary for teachers, even experienced ones, to get the flow of the lesson plan, i.e. how to transition from one activity to the next.

Finding a new apartment in 30 days is stressful enough, especially in a new country. One of my past employers provided the first 30 days free stay in a hotel, another 5 days. For both I needed to find an apartment. It was impossible for me to find an apartment in 5 days, extended my stay an extra 25, paid the extra amount out of my own pocket because I didn't want to settle with an apartment. In truth, in that short of time, you will settle for any crummy condition. But forewarned, you'll be spending the duration of the lease in such conditions. Choose wisely!

That's correct! No costs for the recruitment. But what about visa costs? Are flights to China reimbursed? Are flights provided at the end of the contract, or at least the money to buy them?

Posting omits days of working week - you could have one day off, or dare I speculate, work every day as language institutes schedule classes around when students are available. 

Omits if these hours are guaranteed teaching hours - with a small amount of students enrolled for ESL courses, your 30 teaching hours could shorten, and with that, your pay.

Omits duration of the contract - assuming it's a year, but still worth asking about. 

Here's what this person said about this recruiter and company: 

(from:  http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa?threadID=2134070) 

Kereru makes a good point about the split shifts. Most language institutes will require teachers to work when the students have free time. This means in the morning and at night. 

The final verdict would render this job suitable for teachers to send his or her resume. The job does require a teacher to have a TEFL certificate, so teachers without any experience yet should not waste his time.
With that in mind, he or she must take adequate stock about what their work and personal expectations/ limitations are. She must answer questions about adjusting to a (possibly) new country and culture, energy level to sustain over 30 contact hours, working months worth of possible split shifts and the limited vacation days. However, the company does allow an incentive bonus for teachers, except how managers determine who gets the bonus can be quite political at times. This posting provides good information that outlines standard working conditions for language institutes in China, with this one seemingly better than average. Submit your resume, and during the interview, make sure you ask pertinent questions. Especially about who foots the visa costs, flights and raise questions about the omissions brought up in the analysis.  

Dave's ESL Cafe

A word of caution to those researching jobs. Using websites like Dave's ESL Café, although do have valid job postings from reputable employers, teachers need to be careful. Mixed in with those valid job postings are disreputable employers and scams.

Why would someone do this? To post a job on his website, you must pay money. Disreputable or reputable, Dave Sperling does not distinguish between the two. Therefore, if teachers are going to apply to jobs posted on his website he or she must do further research about the company, school, or employer.

Here's a nice tidbit I found posted on TEFL Blacklist 

(http://teflblacklist.blogspot.com/2007/01/daves-esl-cafe.html)

And further along in the post…

However, the Wikipedia article has since been deleted.

When searching for a job, always proceed with caution. There are reputable job posting websites, and others not so. I would steer clear of any websites that take dramatic action to suppress any criticism. What are they hiding?