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RE: Is Teaching ESL in China a Dead End Job?!
Teaching in Training centers, you do have some opportunities to advance higher up or gain diverse work experience, depending on which company it is.
You could get bumped up to Academic Director, Senior Teacher or a Teacher Trainer. Sometimes this allow you to work with HR and get involved with the hiring process. These companies sometimes offer positions in marketing for their ESL company if you possess any additional skills they can use. Sometimes they have job offers to do work as curriculum developer or editor for their teaching materials.
But as far as public schools and international schools. It's just work as a teacher with potential pay increase yearly. Maybe at most you could get promoted as a lead teacher at the school.
Very true. I don't know all the positions you could be promoted to if you work in a training center. I have a friend that works at EF and he said that some teachers will exchange a salary increase for a job title promotion. So basically they feel satisfaction in being called a Head Teacher or something lol.
Local training centers or some companies like Kids Castle, Web English or Ashton don't offer that much career advancement.
EF, Disney English & Longman English for example have some kind of a career development plan for teachers. Something worthy enough to put on your resume. I saw some people at Disney English bounce from a teacher to working with creating teaching materials and permanently working at the downtown headquarters thinking of ways to help teachers teach more effectively.
But unfortunately not most of the training centers are pro-teacher.
Some training centers are strictly about "teach English" nothing more, nothing less. Teach without an opportunity to get promoted or lateral into another type of position with the employer.
Another dilemma with Teaching English in China is now they are really cracking down on letting expats work more than one job in China. So it puts a damper on the go-getters and hard workers who can handle two jobs at once. If you have a work visa for English Teacher, you're not allowed to accept other forms of employment with other Chinese employers. The only other route is work online.
Some training centers have more ranks than others.
Promotion are something like this:
Foreign Teacher/Chinese Teacher > Senior/head/lead Teacher and Teacher Trainer > Academic Director/Center Director > Regional Director/HR Management and Recruiting
Academic Directors sometimes have the ability to fire you.
Yeah I felt like those guys got some kind of an ego boost being called "head teacher" "senior teacher"