Maybe if you’re single. But with a family? Fuggedaboutit!
If it’s not legal. 'Fraid I cannot offer any help. No there is no governmental policy cutting wages. They sound like liars. But you have no legal legs to stand on.
What’s interesting about GVO is how successful they are.
The Uber or McDonalds of English teaching, you find them in every town in Taiwan it seems and they usually have their own buildings.
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Iirc, buxiban teachers should be registered. Is it applied to sub teachers too?
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I’m curious about this statement. I can’t remember what I earned as an English teacher almost 10 years ago, but I think it was around this amount with about 30 teaching hours a week. That pays $66,000 a month, which is more than what I earned working in a respectable Taiwanese office job, of which the pay was apparently “good for Taiwan”. Since leaving Taiwan and keeping my eyes out for the right job to lure me back, I’ve found that $66,000 a month is normal, if not slightly high, salary for a non-English-teaching expat job.
There’s a big range in expat salaries in non English teaching which is obviously very diverse. It’s really 'how long is a piece of string '. The best thing about non English teaching jobs is there are much higher pay rates at the medium to high end.
Well, most places only give you 20 to 25 actual teaching hours. I don’t see many people teaching 30.
To each their own, but I’d find it incredibly difficult to support my family on only 550 NTD an hour.
From what I’ve found these past couple of years casually looking for jobs in Taiwan, typical jobs open to expats that you’ll find advertised on Taiwanese job sites and LinkedIn pay around $50K to $65K, occasionally going up to $75K for more senior and specialist positions. My understanding when I quit English teaching to take an office job was that non-English teaching jobs in Taiwan rarely pay as good as English teaching for much harder work and longer hours. This seemed to be a common truism among expats.
Maybe things have changed in the near-decade since I taught English in Taiwan, but back in my day, it was easy to teach 30 hours a week. Hours were easy to come by and everybody was looking for English teachers.
For the more entry type level or local jobs this is correct. With more experience or seniority you can make a lot more. Generally with bigger organisations you can get higher pay because they have more senior positions opening up and they have more financial resources usually .
A qualified high school teacher in an international school can make way more than figures above for instance, something like 150, 200k per month . Professors and lecturers in some disciplines more . Senior engineers way more. Lawyers way more. Regional or national sales and marketing managers a lot more . Industrial product designers could easily get 200k/mth.
Some of the govt agencies will pay more than your standard 50k or 60k too.
Then you’ve got your true expats sent over here who may be on the big bucks and packages ( not many of them around ).
Taiwan is a pretty crappy job market my last two jobs I was hired by folks from outside Taiwan cos the local offers …They always lowball.
Those days are long gone. They were already going ten years ago!
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This is true and also not true. Why I say that is because yes an office job may involve longer hours, certainly not always though .
These days
-many office jobs pay more than teaching (this was not true years ago )
-office jobs usually pay you leave and bonuses
-office jobs offer guaranteed salary and will not suddenly cut your hours
-the salary scale can cap out much higher than English teaching
-English teaching was generally much more demanding and tiring work for me than any office job that I have had (YMMV)
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Yeah. I mean, Taiwanese are friendly and all, and this country has a lot going for it in terms of sights and culture. But I sure wouldn’t be working here if my wife wasn’t Taiwanese. My parents and friends back home can’t believe how little I make here. And I’m relatively lucky compared to others, in terms of my hours and salary. But it’s still really low when put against the average for western countries.
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I’m in the very rare position that I probably earn more here than my own well-off country, doubly so when you count the tax take. It’s practically unheard of. Which leaves me in a weird position whenever I think about moving ‘home’. I’m not boasting either I’d love to meet more expats doing well (on a salary ) as it means that there are more opportunities out there. Low job mobility sucks too.
It’s my wife’s potential salary and my kids salary that worry me more !
They’re always in big teaching centres, too. Sell 'em cheap pile 'em high kind of thing, I suppose.
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I really need to find one of these elusive “well-paid jobs” in Taiwan. I’ve been looking on-and-off for around two years now. I earn £50K (almost NT$2 million) a year as a technical writer in London (which is a good salary even by London standards) and I just had a job interview at a big-name company that pays £67K. But the majority of technical writing jobs in Taiwan pay NT$48K to NT$55K a month! I love Taiwan, but how am I supposed to leave London for that?
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You are not supposed to leave London for that kind of drop in income, thats madness …
I worked my balls off to get 'where I am today '. These days I still work hard (on occasion ) but also enjoy my job or should I say aspects of my working life more due to flexibility and charecteristics of said job along with better pay. The better pay being the real point .
I never recommend people to follow my path because it was long and lonely and mostly badly paid along the way with little vacation time thrown in . It makes no sense.
What makes sense to me is you working hard, getting that even higher paid job which is entirely feasible there , maybe moving up the managerial food chain or even another country which will pay you even more, and then evaluating your options in a few years time with a decent amount of cash in the bank. That’s what makes sense to me because that’s what I probably should have done looking back. Why swim against the tide when you are probably not going to beat it ?
That’s good advice and it’s effectively what I’m doing, just that I dip in from time to time to see if one of these magical well-paid jobs in Taiwan appears. Maybe when I have a bunch of money saved up and an apartment in London to rent out, it will be more worth my while to go back to Taiwan. I just miss it so much.
I remember when Tsai ing-Wen was talking about making Taipei City “Asian’s Silicon Valley”. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic. How did she expect to lure the world’s top talent when the pay is so bad that even their own top talent would rather work in China?
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I feel for you but financially it makes no sense for you to come back. Build up that nest egg. At the same time you may look at running your own biz at some point , or in a pure digital role, or else get further education for instance secondary school teaching , which could give you more freedom on working location.
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I know lots of Taiwanese families that earn about 40K/mo, which is about $250/hr. A husband and wife working with a kid or two can live decently here on 80K/mo.
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That’s because you don’t have enough hours then. $550 sucks, but it’s definitely liveable for a lot of the garbage backpacking teachers that flow through Taiwan. That’s what drives wages down for average teachers. Good teachers can still get up towards $1000/hr because they are good at what they do. $6-8000/day, often tax free, is pretty good in Taiwan.
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