The Truth about TEFL Part 3: Selling yourself via Skype

Picture by Jakob Montrasio via Flickr

TEFL job interviews are all about one thing: Skype. Occasionally employers may be in the UK during their recruiting period but for the most part your opportunity to impress them with your

There are a few things it’s important to remember however, if you want to become a Skype interview pro.

personality and suitability for the job will be a virtual one. Many people dread Skype interviews, unsure of how they should behave comparably to face-to-face interviews, but once you’ve gotten a few under your belt they’re an easy and effective way to connect with potential employers with little cost to either party.

1.       It’s still an interview so don’t get lazy. You still need to dress like you would for an interview and take care with your appearance – no top half only, no ‘smart casual’ wear. This is your only chance to make an impression and you don’t want to blow the deal before you even open your mouth.

2.       Do your preparation. When an interview is going to take place in your house, it often feels like the urgency is removed. Do not trust this feeling – you need to isolate a block of time before the interview to read up on the role and refresh yourself on what you wrote in your application. Remember that you won’t have the travel time and the pre-interview coffee shop time that you would with a traditional interview. It’s possible to have notes by your laptop for a Skype interview but you don’t want to be obviously fact checking every few minutes.

3.       Think about your body language. Even over a video link the way you present yourself can say a lot about you to an interviewer so it’s as important to consider your body language in a Skype interview as it is for a face to face meeting. Make sure you centre yourself on the screen and sit a sensible distance from the camera – you don’t want to be overly close but you need to be in range of the microphone. Most importantly make sure you look directly at the camera rather than the picture of the interviewer or of yourself, to maintain good eye contact.

4.       Be aware of the pitfalls of the internet. A lot of places that hire TEFL teachers aren’t renowned for their strong internet connections or good wifi coverage so it is quite likely that there will be a problem with the connection at some point in the interview. Obviously if you have prepared your setup properly this won’t be your problem but there are a couple of things you can do to minimise the damage; firstly, make sure you speak slowly and clearly to ensure you remain audible even if the connection becomes faulty and secondly try and minimise the amount of moving you do – the less work the system has to do to maintain a clear picture the better.

5.       Act natural. Lastly, behave as you normally would in an interview. Try to resist the urge to reference or joke about the nature of the process – it might be novel to you but they do it everyday. Trying to keep yourself in a normal interview mindset will also hopefully stop you being too nervous about the different format and should help you to come across well to the interviewer.

Had a good or bad interview experience on Skype? Let me know below. If you missed the first two parts of my series on TEFL you can find them here.

The Truth about TEFL 2: All about applications

Picture by Six Intheworld via Flickr

So you decide to do a TEFL course-you've endured a ridiculous workload, overly high standards and patronising instructors but the end is finally in sight and you feel like all your hard work (and financial investment)  is going to pay off after all. That's when you get given the career talk and they drop the bombshell: you're not going to find a job - especially if you have a set of criteria - easily, if at all. There are thousands of people just like you, they say, and hundreds of TEFL courses. What employers are looking for is experience. If you’re like me, at this point you start to believe that your life is some hideous groundhog day-esque tragicomedy but fear not! The real picture of the TEFL job market is not as bleak and they’d have you believe.

First of all however, you need to adapt your expectations: if you’re going to be picky, you’ll have difficulty finding something. To be honest, if you want to work outside of Spain, Turkey or Saudi Arabia you’re out of luck unless you have experience. You also need to forget about jobs at prestigious or established schools – they can afford to be selective, you can’t. Also forget about finding work in large, glamorous European cities – partly because the competition in these places is a lot stronger but also because your money will go a lot further in small towns and villages.

Next you need to decide on how you want to progress: you can either dive straight into a long-term position and start applying to language schools immediately or (if you qualify relatively close to summer) you can decide to work summer schools first to get some experience before you launch into more serious applications. There are three advantages to going the summer school route: first, the aforementioned experience, second the lack of experience needed to get a job on one and third they pay extremely well – especially if the programme is residential. A word of warning though – you need to be available from the beginning of July for the majority of these positions, so don’t do what I did and book your holiday for this term two years in a row.

The best place I found to actually look for jobs was www.TEFL.com as it is reliable and fairly reputable. For jobs in Spain www.spainwise.com is excellent for job postings and as a reference for checking the school is legitimate – this is something you need to do whenever you’re offered a position because there are some fairly dodgy EFL schools out there and you don’t want to be stuck providing slave labour for a school in Hong Kong for a year. When you’re applying DON’T apply through the website – use the contact details it provides but send an application by e-mail as I found this was far more likely to get a response. Also ignore the at least one years experience criterion and apply for those jobs anyway – more often than not you’ll make it to interview, despite your CV lacking in this area.

Finally, be prepared to wait out the market. TEFL is a notoriously fickle market and lots of people use these jobs as a back-up for other plans. As a result of this, teachers quite often leave schools hanging at the last moment and, as September approaches, hiring requirements drop drastically as employers panic about not being fully staffed by the beginning of term. It’s at this point that you’re most likely to have success in finding a position that meets some of your own criteria after months of compromising.

If you found this helpful and would like to know more about my TEFL experiences, check out part one of this series here and check back in next month for part 3 where I’ll be talking about how to ace your skype interview.

The Truth about TEFL: Debunking the misconceptions

Having just returned from a year in Spain teaching English as a foreign language I've decided to let the rest of you benefit from my experience in order that you make the most informed decision possible about this major career choice. Don't get me wrong, there were many things I loved about my year abroad and I will cover the positives as well as the negatives over the coming months, however to start with I want to dispel some misconceptions that people might have about the industry.

 

First of all, You can’t go wherever you want – certainly not if this is your first job in the field. You will be at the mercy of the market in terms of location and you may find that there is a small market for EFL in the area you have your heart set on. I wanted to find a position in Germany, but ended up in Spain because that’s where all the jobs were.

As a result of this, It’s not a good way to fund your travelling – unless your idea of travelling is to stay in one place for nine months at a time. A TEFL contract is the same as any other contract and schools are looking to recruit staff for classes that take place throughout the school year. This means you will likely work five days a week, 6 or 7 hours a day. It is very difficult to fit travelling around this, even at the weekends and due to the long summer holidays, you receive very little time off during the year. 

That’s because It’s not a paid holiday – in any way. Contrary to popular belief, TEFL teachers actually work pretty hard and usually in residential areas. Forget beaches and big cities, you’re far more likely to be living in a small town with minimal entertainment and transportation. The fun and excitement of living in another country wears off after about three months and then it becomes just another job, only one in a country where you don’t speak the language.

Speaking of language, You don’t automatically become fluent in a language just because you live abroad. This misconception is a biggie but in actuality, it takes very little knowledge of a language to get by day-to-day. If you want to become fluent, you need to make friends, take classes and talk for extended periods of time as often as possible. You won’t learn a language by magic osmosis unless you have an audiographic memory.

However it’s not all bad because many of these things lead to my last point which is that You can save money as a TEFL teacher – even though the salary is often very low. I saved about a third of my money overall simply because I lived in a very small town with low rent and nothing to do.

I hope that this has helped dispel any misconceptions for those of you thinking about going into TEFL. Stay tuned for the second part of my TEFL series, on job applications, next month. Let me know in the comments if you have any further questions or suggestions to add.