Posts

Find your Dream English Teaching Job

So you’ve passed your TEFL course – congratulations! You are now qualified to teach English and the world is your oyster.

The next step is finding your dream teaching job – but this isn’t always as simple as seems. To give yourself the best chance of finding work teaching English, we’ve put together our top tips for finding a TEFL job:

1. If you have yet to book your TEFL course:

  • It’s good to read up on TEFL jobs even if you haven’t yet qualified! The first piece of advice we would give is to train in the location where you wish to work; this will give you good access to local job vacancies that arise and means that you’ll be there for interviews (sometimes even before your course has finished).

2. If you already have your teaching qualification, but have not yet decided where you want to work:

  • Now’s the time to do some internet research: a good starting point is to check how many English language schools there are in your chosen destination (tip: there are often more opportunities in rural locations than in big cities, where competition is high).
  • Expat forums are a great way to find out what it’s really like to live in your chosen country, and they are a good opportunity to do some early networking; some also show local job posts.
  • Consult the many TEFL recruitment sites that advertise TEFL jobs all over the world. Some people feel more comfortable contacting potential schools and employers prior to their arrival, and these sites are a great way to line up meetings and interviews in advance.
  • Cactus TEFL offers post-course careers advice and support, as well as free access to our very own TEFL jobs board and job alerts. Here you will find potential employers from all over the world, gain an understanding of what it’s like to live and work abroad, and receive expert advice as to the right path for you upon course completion.

3. If you already have your teaching qualification, and are in the location where you want to work:

  • Job searching in-country is the best way to find your dream teaching job. You are already on the ground to read local press and find out about newly-available positions, plus you are readily available to visit schools, attend interviews and meet staff before committing to a job (as it is, after all, just as important that it is the right environment for you).
  • Again, check out Cactus TEFL’s job board for jobs in your area. English language schools in Asia regularly seek ESL/EFL teachers, so sign up for job alerts if you are looking for work particularly in Japan, Taiwan, China or Korea. There are also usually jobs available through Cactus for English teachers in major European cities.

Good luck! If you require help or advice at any point, don’t forget you can contact Cactus TEFL on info@cactustefl.com or 00 44 (0) 1273 830 960.

What is doing a TESOL/CELTA course really like? An Insider’s Perspective

Cactus Managing Director Fay Drewry gives us a first-hand account of life as a TEFL trainee in Barcelona

Having decided I wanted to do my TEFL course in Barcelona and try living and working there for a year – hopefully to improve my Spanish – I set about trying to work out which course I should do and at which school. I had never been to Barcelona but I knew instinctively that it would be a city I would love…a city with a beach, and sun, and Gaudi, and chicos guapos…what more could I want?  I spent quite a bit of time trawling through various websites trying to compare TEFL courses and locations and prices, until I came across CactusTEFL.com. Finally a website that explained everything I needed to know, allowed me to compare courses and start dates, plus they were on the end of the phone to help me with my application – great! So I applied, did the pre-interview task, had a Skype interview with the school, and before I knew it I was accepted onto the course. So far so good, and I even managed to book myself onto a part-time Spanish language course, just to make sure I wasn’t just speaking English all the time!

My course expectations

Having always been fairly academic (good A level results, good degree) I didn’t think that doing a 4 week teaching course to become an English language teacher would cause me too many problems. This was not entirely the case. Initially I questioned if I really needed to spend a significant amount of money on learning how to teach a language I already spoke fluently. How hard could it be? A lot harder than I thought, as it turned out.

So I arrived in Barcelona courtesy of Easyjet, and for the duration of the 4 week course I stayed with a family in a nice part of the city. They were lovely. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to spend much time with them. Mainly because I spent the majority of my ‘free’ time holed up in my room frantically trying to work out the stages of lesson planning, creating materials with no idea of whether they would actually work in class, and writing assignments that at 4am in the morning didn’t make a lot of sense to me either.  This was essentially, the beginning, middle and end of the course. A learning curve like no other I had ever experienced. It wasn’t that the information was complicated or intellectualised – most of it, in fact, was common sense. There was just A LOT of it.

In at the deep end – the course in detail

There were 18 people on my course, but there were 2 courses running simultaneously, so there were about 35 of us all together. English, Scottish, American, Irish, Canadian, and Dutch. A great mix of people from 18 to 55, with a range of motivations, backgrounds and reasons for doing the course.  Teaching in front of my other 17 classmates started on the second day of the course. Not embarrassing at all.  We had to teach our fellow trainees for 5 minutes about something we knew or were good at – having just left PwC as a trainee accountant (the most boring year of my life) I decided to teach everyone how to complete a balance sheet. Not that this had a lot to do with teaching English but it did get us up, writing on the board, in front of a group of people.  From there on in the rest of the course flew by – everyday filled with so much information to take on board, so many different things to think about, so much to understand. Classroom management, lesson planning, setting of lesson aims, achieving lesson aims, checking meaning of target language, ensuring free practice of target language, error correction, varying interaction patterns, catering for different learner styles – not to mention making the materials for all the activities from scratch. It was a surprise that all 35 of us made it through to the end of the course without having a nervous breakdown (only joking – ish).

Throughout the course everyone teaches for a total of 6 hours. Each time was a pretty nerve racking experience – but with each teaching practice the feedback from the tutor helped me to identify which areas I was getting right and which points I needed to work on. This made me feel like I was actually progressing and improving, and allowed me to focus on just a couple of things at a time – rather than trying to get everything right, which was basically impossible. We all had mid-course and end of course tutorials with our tutors, which made us aware of exactly how we were getting on and if we were on track to pass the course. This was an extremely positive aspect of the course – as there were no nasty surprises at the end with someone thinking they were doing great when actually they were going to fail.

So, I got to the end of the course in one piece and passed! What a relief. The lessons learnt were invaluable and there is no way, after having done the TESOL, that I would ever want to stand in front of anyone and try and teach them English without having done the course.

14 years after doing my Trinity TESOL I’m now the Managing Director of CactusTEFL…but that’s another story…

Cactus TEFL is an admissions and advice service for quality teacher training courses worldwide. Cactus works with the majority of well-known course providers to offer CELTA, Trinity CertTESOL, equivalent and online courses in over 90 locations across 36 countries. Cactus TEFL also offers free post-course careers advice and support, as well as access to our very own TEFL jobs board and job alerts.

Cactus Language is a leading provider of language courses in over 120 locations abroad.