Before you commit to a career in ESL, or TEFL teaching it is worth considering whether it is going to be worth it for you? I never actually sat down and thought this through when I started twenty years ago, but I wish I had. Twenty years on, I will now outline the pros and cons as I see them and come to a considered verdict.
ESL and TEFL teaching can be a worthwhile career. You can gain a good salary, work life balance and work doing a rewarding job. However, for some people the time input, energy output required, at times limited salary, and general conditions of employment may mean it is not worth it.
Of course, for a TEFL teacher who worked their way up into management the verdict will be a lot different to a bottom of the rung teacher who stayed in the classroom their entire career never gaining any positions of responsibility or sense of progression.
There is a lot to go through here and you’ll notice that I am combing both ESL and TEFL teaching pros and cons into this article. The reason being that, firstly, my career has combined both of them and secondly, most ESL/TEFL teachers could alternate between to two also.
Right let’s get started with the advantages of TEFL/ESL teaching…
TEFL/ESL Teaching: The Pros
You get the opportunity to play a life changing role in ESL students lives. Helping to improve a students English can provide so many more opportunities for that student in the future. It can be highly rewarding to watch a students journey from beginner to intermediate/expert and how they begin to flourish, as a person and then later on in their careers, or immediately if they are adult learners.
ESL/TEFL teaching in general is fun if you allow it to be. Today, for example, I had my students in a singing competition, boys against girls the lyrics to ‘Our House’, by The Madness.
The purpose of this was firstly, to practise their listening skills and secondly to practise the sound linking between words that my students have been struggling to develop. Great fun, here is the website I was using with premade gap-fills and a range of songs to choose from.
The salary. This can become very decent once you are off the bottom of the ladder and begin to take positions of responsibility and work your way up the ladder.
For example, how about being the manager of a branch of a large language institute franchise, and potential go even higher into the regional management arena, or, what about being a Head of ESL in a private/state school, or, how about moving into curriculum development, become an examiner for a high stakes exam such as TOEIC, TOEFL/IELTS, each of them can be lucrative.
You could even venture into student recruitment, the running of exchange programmes and so on. I have had colleagues go into each of these areas and do well and of course there are international schools to consider.
You will initially be expected to fund your own TEFL certificate though, check out my TEFL certificate recommendations, here.
The holidays. Oh yes, this is a big one! The most amount of holidays I have even been afforded was eighteen weeks paid holiday per year at a private school teaching ESL in the UK.
I have heard of even more and this is undeniably a great benefit. However, beware, private schools in particular do like to get you working at weekends and evenings even more so if it is a boarding school.
Unfortunately though, if you teach in a language institute you may get far less holidays and you will absolutely want to check the fine print on your contract before signing off on it. The main reason I quit my first TEFL job in a language school was because I could earn the same money but get 12 weeks paid holiday, which was more than double the salary I was initially earning so a real ‘no brainer’.
Location independence. The location freedom is awesome! They say a change is as good as a holiday and they are dead right. You could quite easily work your way around the world TEFLing, doing 6 month stints in different places taking in the sights before moving on again.
You don’t have to do this on a shoestring either, ESL/EFL teachers in international schools will usually be paid a very decent salary, usually at least what a licensed teacher would get back in their home country. This is particularly beneficial if you are in a country with lower living costs.
You get to be out of your home country. This might seem strange but it was a major driving force for me teaching abroad. I am from the UK and to be honest I am not always a big fan of our culture, attitudes and politics.
So, I did the only thing I could do which was to vote with my feet and leave. Sure, I enjoy going back from time to time and I miss the green, green grass of home, but essentially, for now at least and as long as the ESL gods permit, I am done with the place.
Meeting like minded people. I guess this is linked to the above point, but you very much get to meet similarly open minded people, well travelled people that have interesting stories to tell and who are from a variety of different backgrounds and cultures which brings a really fresh and vibrant ‘zing’ to the staffroom when you are teaching TEFL abroad.
Being creative and independent – Once the classroom door is closed it is up to you. You can be as creative as you like and do whatever you feel is appropriate and necessary to get the students learning. You are the teacher, it is your room, you are in charge.
But, of course, with great power comes great responsibility and one point that was drilled into me when I was training to be a teacher was that you should respect this position and this potential to influence young people’s minds and for this reason you should always take it seriously.
It is not okay to turn up and deliberately under perform, or not plan and prepare. What you do or do not do, can seriously impact on their future success and well being so always take it seriously. Apologies, lecture over!
Healthcare, life insurance, pensions – Not to brag, but towards the higher end of the TEFL/ESL industry these things will take care of themselves, well, I mean your employer will have these sorted for you. I am sure we can all appreciate how important each of these is and they should be a massive part of your decisions as to which employer to go with.
In your home country of course you will probably have some form of each automatically and if you are abroad a decent employer will know how important each of these categories is for attracting and retaining the very best staff and will have some sort of plan, scheme or option in place for each of these.
At my current international school, for example, we do not get a pension but we do get a double pay cheque each year which is supposed to recompense for this, they also sort out high quality health insurance with AXA, although life insurance is something we have to look into ourselves.
Before continuing on be sure to also read my verdict on what TEFL teaching is really like, here.
TEFL/ESL Teaching: The Cons
To be honest, I don’t like to dwell on the negatives but it would be wrong to ignore the disadvantages, so here we go…
Cowboy owners – Oh boy, this is a big one. A lot of language institutes, international schools and even private schools in developed countries are owned by people with strange ideas about how to do business. And some owners like to be very hands on with their business, which can cause all sorts of problems, especially when they are not trained teachers and are only interested in profit.
Watch out for ‘for profit’ schools in general, they love to flounce on about the deep meaning heart felt philosophies of the founding owners of the schools, which they sell to parents.
But, when you are actually working in those places, the school that portrays itself as ‘caring’, for example, can very quickly turn around and dismiss a member of staff, who might have a house and family to support, for no other reason than that they did not make an adequate enough effort to dress up at Chinese New Year – and that is a true story!
The poor bloke was in tears and quite rightly so, but being as the school was in Thailand there was no real legal comeback he had on it, which brings me to my next point.
Lack of protection – If you get treated unfairly at work what do you do? Maybe an employer withholds pay because you arrived at work a few minutes late, or your contract is cancelled midway, through no fault on your part, or the school decides not to reimburse your flight after all.
If you are in a foreign land and you do not know how the system works then good luck to you because rarely do these situations work out well.
By far the best thing to do to prevent this type of thing happening to you is to make sure that you do your research beforehand. Make sure you are working for a reputable company. Talk to people that work there and not just the ones they put you in touch with, dig a little deeper. Talk to former employees, dig around online the internet international schools review is a good one, but I don’t know of one for ESL/TEFL schools around the world yet.
The truth is, as a foreigner abroad you are an easy target, and if you are young and inexperienced then you are an even easier target.
Visa costs – Who is going to foot the costs of the visa? And not just the visa for that matter? If you have to do a visa run, as is often the case, then who is going to pay for the hotel, the transport and will you be paid for the days you are not teaching?
These are all thorny issue which if not thought of in advance can easily lead to you losing out on a king’s ransom.
Poor management – So many schools are managed by people who have no management qualifications, background or experience in management. They are there because either they just stayed so long so it seemed rude not to promote them, they were a great teacher and were then given a chance as a manager, or they said ‘yes’ to everything they were ever asked or told to do (my least favourite of the three).
Anyone in these categories has the potential to be a ‘complete dick’ as a manager, and this would be funny but for the fact that these people may have a serious say in whether your contract is renewed or not.
It is not a pleasant place to be where a person who is clearly not cut out for management is in charge of your staffroom and future career.
There is no escape – If you are having a bad day then tough, your next class are still going to turn up expecting a decent lesson and if you don’t pull something out of the bag then expect them to make your life difficult with behavioural problems.
Being sneered at – ‘Oh, you’re another English teacher are you?’. The belittling comment that puts every English teacher in their pigeon hole where they firmly belong.
This means that a fully licensed career teacher responsible for seeding the fertile minds of tomorrow’s world is put in the same bracket as the two month TEFLer on their gap year, no offense to two month TEFLers obviously, but you take my point).
Underfunding – This can be a big one. Some schools are so bad that before they let you use the printer and use precious ink they will make you fill in a form which has to be signed by the head of school before you are allowed to go ahead with the photocopying! Imagine how awkward that would be.
Moving on could be difficult – This could be a problem if you dwell for more than a year or two, and let’s face it it is highly possible that someone who gets a taste of Asia, South America, or wherever stays there a bit too long and any existing skills in other career lines go completely out of date.
Where does that leave them moving forward, and what are the career options then? There is a school of thought that ESL/EFL teaching is not even a career!
Go back to the homeland and start again from the very bottom which might seem like a failure, or do you crack on in a TEFL/ESL career, never quite knowing if you could have done a different profession and carved a better life for yourself if you had just planned things out that bit better.
Healthcare, insurance, pensions – You better make allowances for this or you could land yourself in trouble pretty badly at some point. My parents were both career teachers and worked in the UK state system all of their lives.
This means that their pension plan was taken care of and now they are retired living really well off of their pension schemes.
TEFLers typically don’t get anything laid on for them so you better be saving pretty hard all your career because the last thing you want to be doing is having to jet off to the Middle East in order to be able to retire at a decent age.
Of course none of use know when/if we are going to come down with a serious illness or injury. Having no insurance though is asking for trouble, even basic travel insurance can work well for TEFLers. There are so many stories of people getting hurt abroad with no insurance who got themselves into terrible difficulties so please be sensible about this.
Is Being A TEFL/ESL Teacher Worth It? The Verdict
Quite honestly, I was born for it. I genuinely enjoy the job, some people have a raging passion for teaching. I am not one of them, but I do simply find it an enjoyable way to spend time and if I get paid for it then even better!
The fact that it has enabled me to live all around the world for so long and so comfortably aswell as giving me such a rich life experience is just awesome. I wouldn’t change a thing.
Sure, there are people who I grew up with in the UK who have better, more glamorous careers than I do, and who are financially wealthier than I am, but in many ways I consider myself richer than them.
Richer in life experience, richer in terms of the fact that I get to help other people each day. Richer in terms of travel experience, and in terms of the people I have met and the horizons I have now, compared to some of the people I grew up with back home.
In short, the blinkers are off and I have a much clearer view of the world having taught students from many different countries around the world and taught in some of those countries too. It has been and continues to be a truly great experience and totally worth it!
I would highly recommend ESL and TEFL teaching to anyone who has read down to the end of this article. Truly, I feel blessed!
You might also like The Greatest Benefits of Being an ESL Teacher here.
