Best countries for teaching English abroad

[NGH607]

Anyone have experience being an english teacher in Asia or Europe or South America?

What was the pay like?

Which countries required a bachelor's degree and which didn't?

[MrMan]

Anyone have experience being an english teacher in Asia or Europe or South America?

What was the pay like?

Which countries required a bachelor's degree and which didn't?

Go to ESL cafe and look at the job board. That board has been up since at lest 1997, maybe before. I found my second ESL job off of it. You can look at ads and see what the salaries are like.

I taught in South Korea in the mid 1990's. I managed to get $1600 a month somehow out of college with no teaching experience, probably because the home school of the franchise in Seoul paid that. In my city, they were paying $1600. I also got a place to stay, tickets there and back, and health insurance. There are Korean holidays off, also. My job did not include teaching on weekends. There were two kinds of jobs when I was there. One is afternoons and Saturday mornings teaching little kids. You could also get no weekends teaching college students and adults, but those usually had a split shift.

No one told me about the split shift when I got there-- teaching early hours like 7:30 or something like that. I think technically it could start at 6 something but there were no takers. I'd finish the morning shift about ten. Then you go back in at 4 or 5 PM and teach until 9 or 10. I was in my early 20's and still needed a lot of sleep. There wasn't 8 hours at times between the last shift and the first shift. I was jetlagged when I got there. I generally have trouble sleeping during the day. So a week or two into my trip there, I was so tired I felt sick. I might have dosed off a time or two in an early class with one student. I did manage to sleep some of it off during the daytime. Kids make sure to get up at the crack of dawn and play loud outside on Saturday. So I kind of broke my fan and held it together with bread back ties to make it rattle. After a couple of months, I adjusted. It would have been good to know about split shifts. That's common South Korea.

At the time, TV showed fuzzy white snow starting about 10 AM until 5 PM, when I was off. It was in Korean anyway. If I wanted entertainment, I would go to town and play video games or go to a video room and watch a rented video in town. A fellow English teacher friend of mine invited me over to play video games, since he had a computer and wanted someone to play CivNet with.

South Korea required a degree and that was pretty much the only qualification for teaching English, a four year degree from a native speaker country. Since New Zealanders, I think, went to high school an extra year and went to college for three years, they were ineligible. Since Canada had just extended the time teachers could work before retiring, the market was flooded with Canadians. South Koreans preferred American English. I couldn't tell most of the Canadians from Americans from listening to them. There are accents where you can, but my co-worker from Alberta might say 'zed' or something Canadian, but South Koreans preferred Americans. Canadians still got plenty of jobs.

I checked South Korea salaries about a month ago, and they are about $2000 a month. My mid-90s salary would be about $3048 in today's dollars according to an inflation calculator. I also get the impression from the job board that market qualifications are more stringent.

I also taught in Indonesia. Back in the late 1990's, salaries were low, around $1200 a month. I went over there for one job which seemed potentially unstable-- me the only teacher working for an expat who seemed unusually tight with his money. So I got a job that paid about $1200 a month for a year, then got one that paid $1900- over $3300 in today's money. I have a degree in Linguistics, and no ESL certificate. For this last job I did voice acting, edited textbooks, and did a bit of ESL voice acting.

English First came in around that time and started somehow hiring college grads to work for $700 a month, selling them on the adventure, I guess, really messing up the salaries.

A friend of mine from Singapore taught English in China in the early 2000s with no degree. He wasn't ethnic Chinese either. But I suspect China began requiring more stringent credentials.

I ended up going back to grad school and getting into a decent-paying academic field.

Back in the 1990's, I thought the salaries were okay because housing was included. I was young and single with no home and that made sense to me at the time. Financially, the logic makes sense now, from my perspective then. But now I know more, and I also realize that a lot of workers have a mortgage in their home country. And if a foreign employer wants you to work there, they should give you a place to stay and pay you enough to pay for housing in your home country. So from an expat package perspective, for a corporation, they should either pay you for housing in the home country or provide the housing. My last job in Indonesia was like that. They provided housing, and the salary was enough to pay a mortgage in the US. It was actually a mid-range salary for the field, but I found it hard to get a job without having publications yet (not counting a conference pub. and contributing to books out of the field.) There were lots of benefits some of which were cash, so we came out well. They'd pay cash money if we had medical treatment up to a certain limit. I got plane tickets home with the family every year. This was not an ESL job.

As a married man with kids, I think ESL pays poorly. If I had turn the clock back and be 19 in college and a stipulation was that I had to work in ESL, I'd probably get a degree teaching some topic with ESL as an add-on. ESL teachers that worked for international or national plus schools could get US teacher salaries or just below it in Jakarta. One of the higher end schools put up a teacher I knew in a nice marble house in the part of town with the nicest houses, near the school. There are benefits. If you teach at a school, they often let you send your kids there. International schools used to be about $20K on the high end, per year. I'm sure it's more now. The downside is that while the US government gives expats $107,600 exemption on income until taxes kick in, they count your kids education as cash income for taxes unless other teachers get to send their children for free also. Jakarta schools usually didn't do that for local teachers. If you have a lot of kids like me, you end up paying taxes on a benefit that could be potentially free (or included in taxes) in the US.

I'm not sure about no-degree English teaching countries where visas are legal. You could try countries that are at the bottom of the barrel for development. The last I heard, Indonesia required experts, including English teachers, to have ten years of experience. I don't know if they actually allow 'native speaker' to substitute for some of that like I think they did in the past. It might have been easier for someone to bribe officials to get me a visa. (I don't know if they did that or not, since I wasn't involved.)

ESL is a low paying career for expats.

[Cornfed]

English teaching has sucked since about 2010. Best to think of something else.

[NGH607]

English teaching has sucked since about 2010. Best to think of something else.

on the bright side, there's gonna be a lot of job openings soon as the vaxxed die and/or get too sick to work.