Jobs of the Week June 30, 2013

GOOD

Wrinkly Gus is happy with these jobs!

1)Earlybirds – China

jobs@earlybirds.cn

Sounds like a sweet deal. But other than the name of this recruiter, is the sentence at the bottom of the post that really grates against my kisser. You claim you are not a recruiter, but what you describe IS what the job of a recruiter does. No matter if you have ‘personal’ relationships with universities. You are sending out job posts in order to recruit teachers for those specific posts.

It’s like a pig dressed up as a woman, saying it’s not a pig.

Insulting to my intelligence, but still sounds good.

Job details

2) Semyung University – Korea

ktw5797@semyung.ac.kr

Alright! 4 day work week! Low number of students and contact hours! Though, a position more suitable for (somewhat) experienced teachers with qualifications.

Sign me up! But negotiated wisely for adequate pay. Remember: you’re an educated person, don’t let them lowball you.

Job details

3) Kangwon National University - Korea

langcntr@kangwon.ac.kr

Low pay for the type of qualifications and experience this place is looking for. With that in mind, low contact hours, ample vacation time and partly-furnished housing. No mention of flights...

Give it a go if you’ve got at least a year teaching experience with BA or MA...though, I’d negotiate for a minimum of 2.5 Won/ month.

Job details

BAD

Angry or pooping? Or pooping angrily?

4) WithAble Recruiting – Korea

withable3@gmail.com

I’m sketched out by the gmail address. But with that in mind, this recruiter has a range of jobs for your perusal. Different locations with salary between 2.0 – 2.7 million Won. However, some of the contact hours reach upwards of 30 (for kindy, no less) and require you to work 10 hours in one day. Will you lose your sanity teaching kindergarteners 6 – 8 contact hours per day and remain in the office for an addition 2-4 hours? Salary is pretty low for the work demand.

Keep looking.

Job details

5) Orange Education Co - Korea

eduorange@hotmail.com

If a stable, reputable recruiter for the last 11 years, why are you still using a Hotmail address? The website offers suitable information about aspects of the job (contact hours, pay, holidays, etc). Be careful though, since Orange Education Co. is a recruiter, the demands of the director/ principal of language institutes may differ than what is stipulated on the OECo. website. For most of the jobs, there seems to be high contact hours with low pay and are looking for Kyopo teachers (F visas) and E2 visa holders already inside Korea.

As well, misspelled words and grammar errors proliferate on the job posting.

Beware.

Job details

6) ACE Recruiting Agency – Korea

acecareer@hotmail.com

Go to the ACE Career website, under Recruiting Info, and you will read about teacher’s home leave after signing another contract.

I don’t like the unpaid 14 day home leave for teachers who will re-sign. That’s how you pay back your loyal teachers?

I find that extremely offensive, especially when most other institutes pay you for vacation time.

No thanks.

Job details

NOT WORTH IT

[witty caption redacted due to the image speaking for itself]

7) Expertise Education – Beijing, China

hr@expertiseedu.com

No mention of contact hours. Salary is disgustingly low. Look elsewhere. Also, this company should think about renaming it since it sounds so much like the disreputable Education Experts in Saudi Arabia.

Pass...

Job details

8) China TEFL Network (CTN)

admin@helengroup.com

This post is sloppily presented. Reading it makes my eyes hurt, and my heart as well when I read the range of salary offered at the different schools.

White space is important when reading. Organize the information into salary ranges. Learn how to write links in your job post. It's much cleaner...unorganized noob.

No thank you.

Job details

9) Korea International School Beijing – China

 kisbwj@gmail.com

You had me at the salary! But then made me think twice about a small detail you tried to sneak past me.

Yes, 20 contact hours per week is good. Yes, the housing and pay are great too.

But... you have to submit weekly lesson plans. Any good teacher has a lesson plan, but I think you will have to submit highly detailed plans for approval. If you are making the curriculum from scratch, you’ll easily be working 60 hours per week in preparation and teaching.

Go sit on an egg.

Job details

10) British Academic Centre – Moscow Region – Russia

recruit@bc-english.ru

No mention of contact hours. No mention if provided housing is shared or not. No mention of the amount of vacation time. Pay is little more than slave wages. Also, it’s located in the Moscow ‘Region.’ You could be out in the boonies.

Likewise, go sit on an egg.

Job details

English Teacher: Uncle Lion English Academy (South Korea)

"You do want a job?"

"You do want make impression good on youth of style for improvement?"  

Please no rhetorical questions to 'hook my interest.' I'm only interested in the details of the job. Give me those in a straight-forward manner and you've got my interest.

You can read the entirety of this post here from www.tefl.com.

This redunkulous grammar structure is enough to make your head spin. But, that's why I actually like this post - it's hilarious!

A word of advice to Uncle Lion English Academy: Get a native speaker to edit/ proofread your job post before you submit it for thousands upon thousands of native English speakers to view.  

This is a cringe-worthy job posting. The pay is reasonable, as well as the contact hours, but the posting is enough to turn me off of this job. There's no quality in the presentation. So, dear job hunter, why should you believe this company would be good quality?

Things of note:

There's no mention of reimbursement for the medical check and visa costs. Most likely, they will not reimburse you. 

The medical insurance: yes, the company pays for half, but that means the other half is taken out of your paycheck each month. It's a common practice in Korea.

If you have to pay for the apartment, it is not mentioned. But methinks, you will not have to pay because they are stipulating you cannot smoke in the abode.

Here's an example of a good posting.

It's direct, provides necessary information about the job and, best of all, gives me a website to look for further information (in the complete posting). Well done! As well, there are no idiotic rhetorical questions that make me want to rip out my fingernails.

But as with any job in Korea, make sure the contract they send you in your home country matches the contract they ask you to sign once you get to Korea. If it doesn't match, don't sign. First, show your employer the differences, then negotiate, if need be. Second, if all else fails, you can always find another employer once you are in-country. You may have to do a visa run, however, to start a new contract.

Keep on high-alert for crap postings like this one from Uncle Lion (what a name for a company!) Spread the word of this shlock-fest, and hopefully employers will have to improve…at least with their job postings.

Do good English search for job make fun!

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.