After a long hard month of looking for work in Ecuador I finally landed a gig teaching English. Up to this point I had sent out countless emails to schools and recruiters, had interviews but had yet to get any type of solid job offer. Everyone would say, “Oh this looks wonderful, your CV and experience are exactly what we are looking for, we will give you a call!” and my phone never rang. On Tuesday, I had an interview set up with the school that a friend of mine was working at and the interview was lukewarm at best. The woman I met with who was also the director was dealing with a horrible case of sun poisoning and was a little reluctant about hiring me because I wouldn’t be around all year which is understandable. I left the school feeling a little irritated since it had seemed like a done deal from speaking to her on the phone and via email and walked the 30 minutes back to my apartment when there I saw it, about 5 blocks from my house, an English school. I decided since I was dressed for an interview and had all my documents in order that I would march into that school and demand a job. I walked into the building, asked for the school director and saw him in about 5 minutes time. He looked over my stuff, seemed pleased and told me he would call me the next day. Lo and behold, he called me that same evening at dinner and the next afternoon I was teaching at a university which was coincidentally one of my goals for the year. Lesson learned: if you shake enough trees something is bound to fall out .
I am happy to report that one of the Jet Set Zero crew is now employed in Saigon. As mentioned in my earlier note, “Unemployed in Saigon”, last week I had an interview with the hiring manager of the Cleverlearn English Language Centre and today I had to prove my skills by teaching a mock English class. Let me be clear that I have no experience doing this so it took my best acting skills to pull it off. As preparation, I asked for advice from a couple folks currently taking their ESL certification in Saigon (certification which I do not have), youtubed ESL teachers doing their thing and googled ESL tips. Man, the internet is a great thing.
The only thing worse than working a job is looking for a job. Finding employment in a foreign country is rarely easy – you often land not knowing a soul and are unsure of where to start. There’s also the current economic crunch whose fingers reach farther than you would think. At home, I have never had a problem getting work…usually, you ask around to people you know and someone knows someone who is looking for an employee. Problem solved.
I am confident that job hunting will be the most unpleasant part of the whole Jet Set Zero experience for me. I don’t mind working, but it takes a lot of time and effort to network and apply for positions in a city you are unfamiliar with. I started my job search by googling language schools in Saigon and sending my resume off indiscriminately. I spoke with someone who teaches at the university and she told me that although it’s fairly easy to get a teaching job, there is a current oversupply of teachers. Crap. I got in touch with a couple people who are doing local ESL work and they suggested a nearby language centre and gave me a contact name. This turned out to be an awesome tip as the contact person they know is in charge of deploying teachers for many different schools throughout Saigon, not just the actual language centre (which is good because without TEFL or specific ESL certification I’m not actually qualified to work there). I was very excited to get a response asking me to come in for an interview.
So I went in this morning to meet Bich, the centre’s HR person, wearing one of my two nice outfits. It’s strange after working in HR for so long to be on the other side of the table. I didn’t have to say too much as she spent most of the interview explaining how the schedules and classes operate. Apparently she liked the way I listened to her because she invited me to do a demo class on Tuesday where I will teach a mock lesson to some of the staff to test my teaching skills.
The only problem with this is that I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never taught before and don’t speak more than a couple words of Vietnamese. She gave me a sample lesson to use as a guide and I’m supposed to teach for 45 minutes. So it should be very interesting to see how it goes. My master plan is to get the job (obviously) and then use my clout to get the other Jet Set members jobs as well. Wouldn’t that be nice!
I also put up a post on the Saigon group for Couchsurfing which was titled “I NEED A JOB!!!!” I got a response from someone in Saigon who is looking for an individual to do some web-editing work, and I am currently waiting to hear back about that. And, like the English teaching, I will have to fake my way through that as well.
Other than that, the other alternative to find teaching work is to walk through the districts and physically go to the schools, flash my white skin and drop off resumes. I’m really hoping that it doesn’t come to that.
So I will follow up on the site next week in regards to the job search situation! Vietnam is cheap but my money will not last forever…
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