Here's a braindump of some tips and tricks for getting a job in Korea, and keeping it once you're here. I'll add to it periodically as I think of more. If you have any specific do or don't questions, or you disagree with any of my advice, feel free to leave a comment. Don't forget to check out my Teaching In Korea -- The Skinny as well, if you missed it the first time.

• Do not get too excited at an offer -- if you have a pulse and degree, you'll get an offer.
• Do apply for several jobs that look interesting.
• Do ask for contact information for previous or current foreign teachers at the school. If it's refused, walk away.
• Do understand that most hagwons (private schools) are run in what you may perceive to be an unprofessional, haphazard manner. Part of it is cultural -- leaving things to the last minute and then PANICing is a time-honoured Korean tradition. How much of this you think you can endure is up to you.
• Do be wary of agents and recruiters. They don't have their spotty reputation for nothing. You will be better off in many (if not most) cases by being in contact with your potential employers directly.

Continue reading "44 Tips For Getting A Job In Korea (and Keeping It)" »

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I teach adults for a living, and I've been doing it (interspersed with periods of product R&D work in IT) for longer than I care to remember. I conduct business skills workshops these days, as well, but my bread and butter is language teaching.

A bane of the ESL teacher's existence is the undeniable fact that there are, to put it bluntly, a lot of textbooks for adult learners that are, to varying degrees, crap. The reasons for this state of affairs are many and varied, of course. Many of them are weighed down under more than one layer of the old language guano. You're waist-deep before you even get started, digging through the stink to find something useful. But I'm here to help.

Continue reading "Textbooks That Suck And Textbooks That Don't" »

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I can count on one hand the number of English teachers I've met in the ten years since I first came to Korea who were actually certified teachers back in their home country. If the proportion topped 2%, I'd be shocked.

There is one reason for this, and one only, despite the acrimony and scattershot accusations that fly around in waves whenever the Korean media decides once again -- something happening at the moment, but I've promised myself that I won't let this site go topical and start talking about news ephemera, so I'll leave the able chest-beating to others -- that some more ad units can be sold if they haul out the dead horse 'foreign teacher as parasite' strawman to give it another few whacks. The root of the problems is obvious, and it's fixable, but the gordian knot of money and politics and attitudes towards education in Korea continues to keep it from being fixed.

Continue reading "A Brand New Day?" »

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I am planning a series of articles on the practicalities of visiting, living and working in Korea. Here's the first: visa information for people who may be planning to come to Korea.

If you're a national of any of a wide variety of countries, you can enter Korea for up to 90 days without a visa, simply by showing up. If you're Canadian, you can enter visa-free for up to a six month stay. Longer stays require that you get a visa before you arrive, and of course, working while on a tourist visa is illegal.

For the vast majority of people entering Korea to work as teachers, the E-2 is what they will be applying for. If you are offered a job, you can either apply for and get the E-2 before you leave your home country, or come to Korea without a visa and do The Visa Run later. The most common destinations for visa runs are Fukuoka and Osaka, in Japan. Both Korean embassies are well-used to the constant, endless stream of E-2 applicants trooping through, and are quite efficient. Like most embassies and consulates, they do tend to have odd opening hours, but if you time things right, you can leave Korea one day and be back the next, E-2 in hand.

Continue reading "On Visas" »

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There've been a few questions on Ask Metafilter that I've answered with some variation 'why not teach in Korea?', and I realized that there was no place of which I was aware that served as a comprehensive introduction to the Honourable Slave Trade. So, this, originally written for my private site, and lightly revised for OutsideIn.

Truth : I have been working on (OK, thinking about) writing a book, one digging into the topics whose merest surface I scratch here, and one that also answers some of the million questions of general survival ("Oh sweet lord, where do I get real cheese?" "When my male adult student just told me he loves me, what did he mean, exactly?") that loom large in the minds of new arrivals to Korea. A few thousand people a year show up here to teach, at a minimum -- there's gotta be a market for a book like that.

So here's a taste, hot off the keyboard, so that in the future I can answer questions about teaching in Korea with a hyperlink rather than repeating myself all the damn time :

The Skinny

It's pretty often the case that Teaching English in Korea involves very little teaching and not a whole lot of English. This is perhaps the most important thing about all this that nobody ever tells the newbies. In other words, for a very large proportion of people coming to Korea thinking they'll be teaching the English language, the reality is that they probably won't, really. If they have been hired by a kiddie hakwon (variously romanized, a 'hakwon' is a private cram school, and every city, town, village, hamlet and roadside rest stop has 2 or more in any given building), they may well end up in reality as a babysitter, thrown like human chum into the toothy screeching kindy shark pool with no guidance whatsoever from management and no means of self-defense. The actual English teaching that gets done in this situation may be minimal, while the neophyte teacher is busy struggling for survival. These teachers, with no training and no idea of what's expected, end up relegated to the position of entertainers. Many, having had no experience teaching, are completely OK with this.

Continue reading "Teaching In Korea -- The Skinny" »

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