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The gates are closing
May. 10th, 2005 02:27 amYa know, I've been checking out the job situation for teachers in Canada recently. It seems like it's gotten worse since I checked last year. Our universities have been pumping out hordes of teachers in anticipation of all the baby boomer teachers finally retiring. This has been going on for the last decade or so. But the damn methuselahs are hanging on to their careers with their teeth and their dentures are not about to slip yet! What does this mean for anyone new to the profession? Well, you can look forward to spending a few years with the very uncertain income of a teacher-on-call before you rack up enough seniority to gain short term contracts. That is, IF you can even get on the teacher on call lists for the area you'd like to live in; not even going to a university in the local area will guarantee that anymore (as some members of my cohort found out last year). When the methuselahs finally start kicking the bucket in droves and the current teachers-on-call actually get a shot at full time income, new teachers STILL won't have much of a chance; they'll be competing with all the ex-pats (such as myself) who, needing full time income straight away (can you say 'student loan'?), had been forced to teach overseas and have been waiting to come home.
Okay, so what about the ole stand-bys such as teaching overseas? Well, teaching English in the orient will be there for a while yet, as countries such as China, Taiwan, and Thailand desperately try to make English (effectively) the second language of their nations. But going that option has its risks (such as agencies ready to screw you over) and detriments (such as much lower pay). As those markets expand, the qualifications needed to get the better jobs are increasing, so much so that you already need to have a university degree of some sort to teach there. Of course, this assumes that you want to teach English.
What about the rest of the world? Well, much of Europe and Asia are hiring, but you need to have at least a year or two of overseas experience to get into those markets. That leaves the UK, which, until recently, would take just about any instructor who could, as one of my previous instructors so quaintly put it, 'fog a mirror.' There are reasons for this; the UK has a well deserved global reputation for having some of the hardest schools to teach in. As a result, the UK has a very difficult time retaining teachers.
The traditional route of entry into the UK was to be hired by an agency, spend about a year as a teacher-on-call (and you will get full-time, or near full-time work) until some school you happen to be temping in decides to offer you a contract (buying out an agency's contract is very common). Unfortunately, some nasty changes in immigration policy have endangered this system; now only the school directly employing a foreign teacher can acquire the work permit for that teacher. What this boils down to is that foreign teachers can no longer work for an agency unless they have some means by which to achieve a legal working status on their own. This will make life rather interesting in UK schools, as they do tend to rely fairly heavily on foreign teachers to handle their amazing turnover rates.
With so many options for the new teacher disappearing, I find myself very fortunate that I've managed to slip through the gates just as they were closing; if I had finished my schooling this year, as opposed to last, I would've been up the creek. As it stands, I have much less freedom to find work in the UK as I would have through an agency, but at least I will likely have continued full time work through the school I'm currently employed at. When I finally return home, I will also have a rich body of experience that someone TOCing for a few years simply would not. After all, as many teachers back home would say, "If you can teach a year in the UK, you can teach anywhere."
Okay, so what about the ole stand-bys such as teaching overseas? Well, teaching English in the orient will be there for a while yet, as countries such as China, Taiwan, and Thailand desperately try to make English (effectively) the second language of their nations. But going that option has its risks (such as agencies ready to screw you over) and detriments (such as much lower pay). As those markets expand, the qualifications needed to get the better jobs are increasing, so much so that you already need to have a university degree of some sort to teach there. Of course, this assumes that you want to teach English.
What about the rest of the world? Well, much of Europe and Asia are hiring, but you need to have at least a year or two of overseas experience to get into those markets. That leaves the UK, which, until recently, would take just about any instructor who could, as one of my previous instructors so quaintly put it, 'fog a mirror.' There are reasons for this; the UK has a well deserved global reputation for having some of the hardest schools to teach in. As a result, the UK has a very difficult time retaining teachers.
The traditional route of entry into the UK was to be hired by an agency, spend about a year as a teacher-on-call (and you will get full-time, or near full-time work) until some school you happen to be temping in decides to offer you a contract (buying out an agency's contract is very common). Unfortunately, some nasty changes in immigration policy have endangered this system; now only the school directly employing a foreign teacher can acquire the work permit for that teacher. What this boils down to is that foreign teachers can no longer work for an agency unless they have some means by which to achieve a legal working status on their own. This will make life rather interesting in UK schools, as they do tend to rely fairly heavily on foreign teachers to handle their amazing turnover rates.
With so many options for the new teacher disappearing, I find myself very fortunate that I've managed to slip through the gates just as they were closing; if I had finished my schooling this year, as opposed to last, I would've been up the creek. As it stands, I have much less freedom to find work in the UK as I would have through an agency, but at least I will likely have continued full time work through the school I'm currently employed at. When I finally return home, I will also have a rich body of experience that someone TOCing for a few years simply would not. After all, as many teachers back home would say, "If you can teach a year in the UK, you can teach anywhere."
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