With its potential to transform lives, teaching is one of the best jobs in the world. If you’re looking to pursue a fulfilling profession that can give you a stable income and bring you incredible satisfaction, then teaching it is!

Over the past few years, there has been a noticeable upward trend in the number of people that are moving abroad to pursue their careers as English teachers, especially in western countries. This trend doesn’t come as much of a surprise considering the growing importance of English as a global language.

If you took your TEFL qualification and you are planning on moving abroad to work as an English teacher, you can become a part of different types of educational institutions.

Public Schools

Moving abroad to teach English in a public school could be a great opportunity for you to work with locals and practice a new language. Since public schools aren’t fully immersion-based, you will be required to have some knowledge about the local language.

Private Schools

If your goal is to teach English somewhere where you would require little to no knowledge of the local language, then a private school is your best choice. You have many potential options when it comes to private schools, including military schools, international schools, etc.

Freelancing

This has become the most popular option since the Corona Virus outbreak and something advisable to consider. Companies are shutting down or changing their business model and teachers need to be adaptable and ready to change the way of working. This is why building your own brand and working for multiple companies at the time is now considered a safer option than working full time just for one company.

In this interview, we talk with an English Teacher who moved to Japan and built her own teaching business:

How to Become an English Teacher Abroad?

The path to follow varies depending on multiple factors, including if you are a native or non native speaker, your studies, the country you want to move to, and work permission.

The first step is obviously to get a qualification to teach English as a Foreign (or Second) language. If you don’t have one yet, you could consider enrolling on one of our available courses.

Besides giving you the necessary knowledge to start teaching English, these courses give you also a better understanding of how this industry works and what is the best practice.

Your mindset plays also an important role on your future plans: is this something you are doing because you want to spend some time in another country and live an adventure, or is this something you are considering doing for a long period of time?

Before moving abroad, it is advisable to get some experience in your country, to be sure that teaching is something ypu actually like to do.

It is not that rare to have imagined yourself as a teacher, but then when you are actually on the job you find out this is not what you like. Remember that being a teacher implies a series of activities, and not all of them involve teaching. It is better to find out this job is not for you when you are still in your country than 2.000 Km from home.

Start with local jobs, libraries, private lessons, working with agencies and giving online classes. In this phase, working for free for a short period of time or accepting a low salary could be a smart move.

In these articles you will find out:
– How to find students in your local area.
– How to open your Teaching Business

This will help you to develop your personal teaching style, gain confidence and add up on your CV, and then you can apply to work abroad.

A Survey to help English teachers

Gallery Teachers is conducting a study for English Teachers to understand the teaching conditions all over the world so that we are able to provide research-backed advice to our members considering pursuing their careers as English teachers abroad.

For this purpose, we are looking for English teachers employed abroad to share their experiences with us, including information about finding a teaching job in a specific country, finding accommodation, making friends, working conditions, food, transportation, level of satisfaction and so on.

As a thank you, we will give all the participants one month of free PRO membership on galleryteachers.com.

Where do I take the Survey?

The link to take the survey is: https://forms.gle/cVjh47y1Ev5MC9UYA.

If you’ve been teaching English abroad, you are welcome to share your advice to help fellow members of the English teaching community to pursue jobs abroad and make a positive difference in the world.