Kicking off your TEFL career can simply mean booking your plane ticket and getting out there. But, with schools becoming pickier about who they employ, it’s worth standing out from the crowd. Follow these three simple tips to leave the competition eating your dust.
1. Do more training
You could head out without any qualifications at all, but you won’t get paid much. You could go for the simplest TEFL course, but so do lots of other people. Just adding those extra few hours of study can make all the difference to both your confidence and your employability. A Grammar Awareness Module will improve your confidence in a tricky area, while if you know that your country of choice loves business English or has loads of opportunities for private tuition, do some specialist training.
Or you could simply add some classroom training to further boost your enthusiasm and make that first class of your own less daunting.
Follow these tips and you'll be facing your first TEFL class in no time at all!
2. Get some experience
There are plenty of opportunities to get your first taste of the classroom. Volunteering abroad for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months will look great on your CV/resume: not only will it show your passion for heading out and facing the challenges of living in a new country, but you might even make some contacts who can arrange you a job for when you’ve finished. Get in touch with charities and NGOs abroad to see if they could do with some help.
Another great way to get some TEFL experience is taking part in a paid TEFL Internship in either China or Thailand. You'll need to commit to a few months, rather than a few weeks, but by the end of you'll have over 300 hours of teaching experience and your pick of TEFL jobs.
If you’d rather stay close to home, look out for literacy projects that need volunteers or even ask at your local school about spending time as a classroom assistant. Anything to give you that edge and fire you up for your first job.
3. Target your CV/resume
They say that first impressions count, and your covering letter and CV/resume are your foot in the door, so don’t waste them. Keep them simple and succinct: this isn’t a chance to show off your vast vocabulary, it’s a chance to get started in an exciting and rewarding career.
Speaking of sticking to the point, if you’re responding to an advert, make sure you read the job description and address each point in sufficient detail. Employers don’t just want to know about your “excellent presentation skills”, they want to know what you presented, how regularly and using which computer programme. And avoid lying, because you’ll only regret it when the interviewer asks about the time you “taught underwater basket weaving to the Bakongo people of Angola”.
Even if you’re just updating your CV/resume, make sure it’s tailored to TEFL by thinking about the key skills, such as leadership and flexibility, that make a great teacher.
So that’s it, the perfect starting point for improving your chances of finding work. But don’t stop there, we’ve got plenty more tricks up our sleeve: Download your free copy of TEFL Uncovered: How to Teach Your Way Abroad with TEFL for 145 free pages of ideas and insider information.
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Volunteering is a good way to impress people inmy experience. I didn't do it abroad, I did it in Bristol, UK, although tesol is very different from tefl for a few reasons-
The students are pretty dependent on learning and are very motivated. They would turn up early and listen attentively and take an active part in class, always.
There were different levels and nationalities in the class, so plenty to do! I was only teaching assistant as the classes were run by Bristol City college, and getting a job was impossible but helping out happened instantly.
Some of the students could speak a few languages but had never been to school and were iliterate. I used to teach them phonetically. Many had had a fairly traumatic or difficult time reaching the UK and learning and fitting in there was important for them.
Others in the class came from Poland and were well educated. You had to deal with the impatience of the fast students, the slower ones knew all about it so tension was a possibility.
Some of the female students came from cultures where women are not educated. They would find it difficult from a cultural viewpoint.
I was recently in a job interview where the interviewer honestly couldn't imagine a class like this. She was very impressed with the insights it had given me into managing a class. I didn't do the class management but I learnt a lot about how to and why it's so important.
It's easy .... I just went into the local immigrants advice centre in Easton and asked what I could do. I also went to the Sikh Resource Centre and volunteered there as there was a sign in the window for English lessons.
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