Teaching Abroad for Long Periods of Time

An overview of things you should be thinking about while overseas

Think networking, at home and overseas, and think about continuing or improving your credentials. Think about all the things you would do if you were still back home.

Networking

Networking is even more important overseas. You can, at times, line up good jobs via friends, often with only cursory interviews. Contacts and networking work for you even better overseas than back home.

Keep in touch with people you work with. They will move on to other, often better jobs, and so will you. You never know when your paths may meet again. Or, when you might be able to help each other.

Back Home

Don’t forget to keep in touch with your contacts and friends back home. You never know when you might want to head back. Invite them to visit you, be a great host, give them the vacation of a life time!

It could well pay dividends if you were to need a job back home on short notice. But, also, just do it for fun, not just to create an obligation.

Visit your Friends, Bosses and Coworkers

When you go back home, make sure you visit your old coworker, bosses, and friends. Nothing is worse than coming back home “cold” – having lost all your old contacts.

The work/job hunt environment back home, to me, is much more difficult than it is overseas. Much more impersonal, much more dehumanizing. Do your best to keep it personal, with a good list of personal contacts.

Improve your Credentials

Take another training course, get another degree. Some jobs overseas are only four days a week and you may get long vacations if you are lucky. Use that time to improve your credentials – so you can continue to move up the ladder and improve your wages, benefits, and free time.

Double Check Validity

Any course you take via distance learning, online, or even partial residence, may or not be considered valid where you want to go/teach next. Double check. Ask on the boards, ask potential employers what they accept and don’t accept.

Some countries and employers are very strict and some accept almost anything. Some countries will have liberal acceptance policies that hiring authorities don’t always follow and aren’t legally required to follow. Double check the reality on the ground.

TED’s Tips™ #1: Just because you are abroad doesn’t mean you don’t need to network, improve your credentials and maintain contact with old friends and employers. It is even more important.

TED’s Tips™ #2: Networking abroad is critical if you are to stay overseas a long time. Networking will especially help smooth out any rough spots caused by bad economies, bum employers or miscalculations on your part. And it is always good karma to help a friend in need find a new job. I’ve done it a few times and I know those friends, especially, would help me out if I needed it.

Get Real and Get Flexible for TEFL

How the “Other” World Operates

Today’s post might seem like more of a rant, but it is meant to help people understand a bit of how the non-Western world operates.

In the course of my TEFL career I have dabbled a bit in a variety of things and one of them is recruitment (Satan!). Well . . . some people consider recruiters satanic. Some are not so good, some are great.

I enjoy recruiting because I am a bit of an evangelist for TEFL careers and of the extra-ordinary lifestyle that teaching English abroad can provide to us relatively normal folks who don’t have doctorates or degrees in rocket science.

One of the problems that I see in people who are interested in working abroad is a rigidity about how things must be and a general lack of flexibility about letting things be different.

My favorite example is of a person who was seeking a job in China, which is where I sometimes place people. He was a well-qualified teacher and had already signed a contract when the school asked him to sign another one. The new one was blank.

Now, I don’t advocate signing blank forms or blank contracts but sometimes to get what you want you have to do what someone else wants. The teacher had a fit and withdrew from the position. The teacher had experience in Japan and in Korea and said he had never had to do such a thing before.

I quite understand his bewilderment and discomfort with the idea, but the signing of blank forms is a common thing in many countries.

In the aftermath, my wife and I sat down and tried to remember all the contracts and forms that we had signed while abroad that were either blank or written in a language that we couldn’t at the time understand and there really were too many to count.

Another example was just yesterday at the post office. I went in pay my annual fee for my post office box and the clerk asked me to sign a blank form that was written in the local language.

Did I balk, have a fit, stomp out, demand a translator or refuse to sign it?

No, it just seemed like a regular form they used and she needed it filled out, but as I couldn’t fill in the blanks, she would do it later. No problem, I signed and in fact, got a nice refund on the security deposit for the PO box! Great surprise.

All I am trying to say here is to be flexible and try to read situations before freaking out and bailing out.

Try to read the person and the situation. Don’t sign a blank form that a stranger offers who pops out of dark alley, of course. But if a human resources clerk at your language school asks you to sign a blank form for immigration – really, it probably is okay.

Much of the world operates on trust far more than the Western world. They don’t tend to have the trust in contracts that we have, they know how easily they can be broken.

People who are always looking for “scams” and other things do tend to find them. That’s just how the world works. Yet, in my 20 years abroad, I’ve not yet signed my future paychecks over to a clerk or signed a confession for something I haven’t done.

But then I haven’t been actively looking for scams and expecting them to appear in my life.

Ted’s Tips™ #1: Take some trust with you into the real world. It is not a bad thing.

Ted’s Tips™ #2: Learn to read people and situations and gauge your responses by the situation rather than by a rigid set of YES/NO rules.