I am thinking about going to Taiwan in August 2023 to teach English for one year. I need help deciding how I should go about doing this (going with an agency vs job hunting in-person)!
A bit about me:
I am a 24-year-old certified Canadian teacher with a BEd and I also have an accredited TESOL certificate. By the time I leave for Taiwan, I will have about 1 year of experience substitute teaching
I have about 8 years of experience tutoring kids (primarily English and Math)
I do not plan to pursue teaching for the rest of my life, so I don’t really care about landing a position that will advance my career
I mostly would like to go to Taiwan to experience the culture, language, city, etc (Taipei or busy cities like Taipei that are rich with nightlife would be preferable for me), so the less overtime work, the better! Making a lot of money isn’t a huge priority of mine, but I would also like my work to be enjoyable/not too stressful!
I am a Chinese born Canadian who knows very little mandarin/Chinese… but I’m working on it!
Options I’m considering:
Foresight I.E.C. - I’ve had my eyes set on Foresight I.E.C. for a while, but recently, a whole bunch of negative reviews on it came out and now I’m a little bit wary about going with them
Going there on a visitors VISA (if that option is available next year…) and job hunting in-person
I would love your opinion on which option you think that I should pursue, and I’m open to other options/agencies. Agencies are appealing to me since I don’t speak mandarin and I feel like it’s the “safe” option since they’ll be able to help me with my VISA and with getting settled with accommodations and whatnot. But I also want work to be enjoyable and I haven’t seen the best comments/reviews about people’s work environments when they go with agencies.
And if anyone has personal experience with Foresight or Teach Taiwan, I would love to hear your positive/negative experiences!
That’s not helpful @papertowel. I’ve slept in a bed and not a futon my whole life.
I dont recommend a recruiter. Recruiters are known to be useless and take part of your salary on top of it. If you go straight to the source (the FET program), your school is expected to help you with all the visa and housing and whatnot. Go through a recruiter and your school wont help you at all. So when your recruiter inevitably doesn’t do anything to help, that means you’re totally on your own AND you still dont have Chinese (language) or local contacts to help you.
Just remember all that glitters is not gold, and whatever intrigue or mystique you’ve built up around Taiwan will fade long before your contract is up at whatever school you settle with. So make sure you’re coming here for the right reasons or you’ll burn out halfway through. Also I second what @nz said… stay away from recruiters… especially those named “Bryan Wu.” I’m not even sure if he’s still active, but he was/is the most infamous of them all and that’s saying a lot, since 99% of them are scumbags looking to unload their crappiest jobs on unsuspecting newbies.
I’ve got a school in New Taipei City. PM me. I’m not a fan of the public schools. It looks like a solid job but their are also a lot of headaches. Anytime I hear someone is making teaching a profession I reach out to get them in my school
Thanks for your advice! From my understanding, the FET program mostly has schools in rural areas and I’m more interested in living in/close to Taipei. Do you have any recommendations for schools located in/close to Taipei?
The FET program was everywhere when I left two years ago. Unfortunately, Fulbright and their children…I mean “highly qualified, top graduates from the US” has taken over pretty much every country and city with their overworked slave labor, so that’s certainly reducing where you can get public school opportunities across the board.
I think if you want to be in Taipei, you can apply to the city government? I know the cities do have their own program…
Bryan is very much still active. Although he often uses a woman’s name to get responses to his ads now. Then tries the hard sell while demanding copies of all your documents.
Two years ago. You seem like a nice guy, and I’ve enjoyed exchanges with you here, but I hope you realize that your handing out insights on the FET Program becomes decreasingly helpful the longer you’re out of the mix. I know you have this thing where you hate on the Fulbright Program, but as far as I can see there are bigger problems with the job. General mismanagement/disorganization for one. Apathy for another.
The FET Program is a mess right now, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can mean a hands-off approach to the foreign teacher if he/she’s in the right school. They recently shut down the FET portal they were pushing so hard, all the important forms that were due are no longer due, and my county has neither a functional English Teaching Resource Center nor a local head of the TFETP program. BUT I’m way down in Hengchun anyway, so this means no meetings an hour + away and no irritating press conference/photo-op activities.
To the OP, if you’re sure you’re only going to be here for a year Teach Taiwan might be the easiest way in. They offer plenty of positions all over Taiwan, many in the big cities. Yes, they can be irritating to work with, but I’ve never heard about them ripping anyone off. Just read your contract carefully.
As someone above said, there’s also Hess. I know guys that are perfectly happy working for Hess. It just depends which branch you work at.
To work in New Taipei City public elementary schools you have to go through Ren He. They are the agency that does all the hiring for that. I’m not sure who recruits for jr or sr high school. You can find Ren He on some of the Facebook recruiting groups.
I have nothing bad to say about Ren He. They don’t skim money from the contracts (they follow the same pay scale as the FET one) and they continue to help the teacher even after they are hired. Last year the contracts with New Taipei City were slightly different but better than the FET one. I’m not sure about this year since both contracts had some changes.
No such thing ever existed in any of the places i taught either.
My massive quoting is not in any way intended to be a criticism of you @TimesThree, but rather to emphasize the vastly differing experiences that each individual is going to have when coming to TW. Some areas’ public schools only use recruiters (also called “agencies”) and some of them are great and some of them are scum. The same goes for the individual school. I have been at schools where I had a great relationship with my coteachers, only to leave and find out the new FET doesn’t get along with anyone and wants to leave two weeks in. Sometimes that’s the schools’s fault, sometimes it’s the FET’s fault, and sometimes its just a mismatch of personalities.
I will say, regardless of what anyone ends up doing in Taiwan, the ONLY advocate for yourself is yourself. No one is going to actively reach out and ask if things are going well and then do anything to help you out if you say you need it unless you are explicitly clear in what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what needs to be done to fix it. This applies no matter which sketchy faced cram school or top tier international school you end up at. Everyone’s experience is going to be different and you’re not really going to know why or understand peoples rants on the internet until you actually come here, experience things for yourself, realize what people meant, and make adjustments or decide to live with consequences of not making adjustments accordingly.
No idea why. I saw a job advertised (Taipei) and ended up dealing with him. The person that I emailed was definitely female and I started getting spammed by Bryan. When I saw Taichung and Bryan I politely declined but he still kept demanding my documents.
I was referring to the job posts. They always come from the same email, even if the username is different. Couldn’t/shouldn’t there be a vetting process for jobs posted on this site? Otherwise that’s basically spam.
All posts from new users have to be approved, and banned members sometimes try to come back as well. I’m surprised how much volunteer time is spent on these two things
I don’t believe the same email address can be used for multiple accounts, but actually I can’t see email addresses which are protected for privacy. @tempogain can confirm if the same email can be used for multiple accounts
Would you volunteer to check every job post and make the spam-or-not decision? Otherwise, you can flag if you suspect and someone will look into it…
I thought HESS was like the worst recruiter around?