 Career Advice
Hi, I'm wanting to get into TEFL as a career and I'm just looking for advice about how my career might progress. It seems that there's a lot of advice on starting out, but not much on how to turn it into a long-term thing. I think currently, the best option for me is to take advantage of the weak dollar and do a CELTA course in Bangkok, hopefully being able to arrange employment while I'm out there to gain to real experience. But from there, there seem to be a variety of options. I'd like to know what options each qualification offers. For example, in order to work in a university abroad, I think an MA in TESOL is required. Equally, jobs in ESL in Britain seem to not strictly require it, but everyone seems to have it (the last thing I want is to be qualified to work anywhere in the world except my home). And when reading up on them, a lot seem to say that they are not strictly teaching degrees in the same way as a PGCE. Is this a standard thing, or does it vary from course to course? A PGCE (plus a year in a school) obviously gives you qualified teacher status in the UK, but it's presumably quite a different set of teaching skills to teaching ESL students? So how respected is a PGCE in secondary English (the only thing I'm qualified to teach) the field of EFL? Finally, the other option seems to be a DELTA qualification, which seems to be more of a practical qualification, but I can't help thinking that 3 months compared to a year for a masters doesn't really compare. I know a masters is a minimum requirement to get university work in Japan at least (the country I've researched the most - though apparently now, a PhD is becoming more common too).
I was actually considering doing a PGCE in secondary English for a while, because you can get grants to do that, whereas you have to pay for TESOL qualifications. But I can't help but think that it's not really going to be teaching me what I want to do, even if it does teach many of the same skills.
And how easy is it to switch between countries? I mean presumably once you get to a more academic level (colleges, universities, state-run high schools etc) then a certain command of the native language is required, and experience teaching people from that particular country? Just for the record, the main countries that interest me are in South-East Asia (particularly Thailand and Japan) and Eastern Europe. Though I'm not the best at learning languages, so I can't see me moving around too much.
So if anyone could give me an outline of what sort of opportunities each qualification offers, both in English and non-English speaking countres, I'd really appreciate it. And perhaps some of the more experienced teachers might be willing to share their own career progression?
I know I've asked a lot of questions, but I hope some of you could take the time to answer as many as you can, because you'd be helping me out a lot.  |