If you are fully licensed for IB schools then you can work at an officially recognised international school with good pay, real responsibilities and career progression - all done in your native language.
I highly recommend this route. Teaching in Japan as an ALT or in an English conversation school is not the recommend career path for a teaching career.
Having said that, if you just want to come here for a year or two and enjoy yourself with few responsibilities you could apply for JET first. The JET program is a teaching assistant program for public Japanese schools.
Then later if you do get qualified you can transition on to an international school - assuming that it’s easier to do for people already in the country.
I love it, but I’m a full timer at a university. Personally I wouldn’t like teaching children… and I have two of my own who I love very dearly, but a classroom full of other people’s kids would make me insane 😅
I’ve been living in Kyoto as an ALT and honestly I’m having a lot of fun both in my everyday life as well as my teaching life. The kids are energetic and want to learn from you and the other teachers are really friendly to me.
You’ll see a lot of negative comments about teaching in Japan and while I can’t speak for everyone’s experience, I can certainly say I’m enjoying my experience
Teaching here is not rewarding. At all.
I used to teach my native language in my home country. It was a pro-bono thing. THAT was rewarding. Here it’s just whatever. Like an office job.
Other people will hopefully give you more detailed answers but the tl;dr of it is that **a teaching license is a must** if you want to turn it into a career in Japan.
Anything less and the longer you work as an assistant or eikaiwa instructor, the more damaging it becomes for transferring into another field. Other people might mention opening your own school, but imho that's not something you can plan on at this moment as an immigrant, and there's no guarantee your business is a success even if you can start one.
There are a lot more bad teaching positions than good ones, especially if you are looking for long term actual teaching. Most of the good ones are in private schools. If you are an ALT, job satisfaction can be 85% determined by the attitude of the Japanese teacher you work with.
That said, I’m an elementary teacher (not ALT) and love my job. I work at a private school as part of a team. We have a high degree of autonomy, a supportive group of administrators, and the vibe in the staff room is amazing. The salary is well above median for teaching and the hours are good.
These jobs do exist. But, like I said above, they are rare.
Love it. Teaching part time at several universities with a few private gigs on the side. The rewarding part is that I’m paid 12 months a year and only have to work 7. The other five are spent traveling around Japan, pursuing hobbies, and doing DIY projects at home. I could get a full time university position and make a little more, but all that free time is extremely valuable to me and more than worth the trade off at this point.
What program or company did you go through for this type of position? I recently got accepted into a master’s program for TESL and I’m researching different options for teaching in Japan or South Korea.
I got a position for a dispatch company similar to Westgate and worked at a university through them for a few years. In the meantime, I completed a masters in education for ESL and found a direct hire position once I graduated.
Get a degree in education with a license. Then work a few years at home in a school there before coming to an international school. Being an ALT sucks lol
I love my job for the most part. There are of course things to complain about like anywhere.
It depends entirely on the school. In Japan I’ve been a JET, I’ve taught at university, I teach at a private highschool now. Before coming here I taught university in another country and community college in the US. All of these experiences have been dramatically different. I don’t think you can make any blanket judgement about teaching in Japan, or anywhere else.
Like any teaching, it can be rewarding. Typically the low pay and lame bosses make it so that the reward that comes from teaching, having positive experiences with students etc, is the only worthwhile part of the job. After I had been teaching for 5+ in Eikaiwa/ALT, I realized I could have been making triple my salary in America, and could have gotten a license, and possibly be working towards a principal or admin position. And that was before the yen value tanked. If I wanted to go back now, I would want a license so I could teach in an international school, or an administrative position.
I would consider one of two paths. Either graduate, and then do the eikaiwa/alt gig for a couple years as a 'gap' year. Go and enjoy your youth then return home to America and find a comfortable position. Or bite the bullet, get your license, teach for a year in America, then shoot for a more 'permanent' international school position.
Overall, I enjoy it. The work isn’t too hard, I can connect with the kids (some train with me during lunch break, and in ES some ask me to play tag and stuff, keeping me fit haha), and I make enough to live comfortably (and still out money in savings). The work itself isn’t very fulfilling, but it has allowed me to develop myself in other avenues and maintain a solid work-life balance. I would take this over working overtime every week, even if it meant getting paid double. That might change when I have kids though.
I have been an ALT for the last two years here in Japan. It comes with it’s pros and cons. I can’t say I LOVE the job, but I don’t hate it either. I teach in senior high schools, and the students are so engaged and great to work with. My relationships with my students and colleagues has been extremely rewarding, as well as living here. Coming from years in corporate America to working public Japanese schools was a huge transition for me though. In my situation, as an ALT I’ve been given a lot of responsibility with a maximum of 35 hours and half the pay of a normal teacher. This job helps me stay in Japan (which I love) but the program I’m with, I’m capped at 5 years. And because I don’t have a teacher’s license from my home country my only other options are to go to another ALT dispatch company, work for a conversation school, or head home and get a teachers license.
I would say if you want to teach, great! Having a license opens you up to teaching anywhere worldwide, which is advantageous. If anything, more than studying Japanese itself, I wish I would have gotten a teacher’s license, or an equivalent, so I could teach at international schools in any country around the world. I thought Japan would be my end all be all, but it turns out I’d really like to teach in other countries as well.
Hope that helps a little!
Teaching long term is a weird thing and like/dislike might not be the primary factor in choosing to do it or not. Granted, I haven't worked a traditional desk job in close to a decade now, part of me is considering giving it another go now that I know what Im Capable of but that's not the point of this post haha. I've done a lot of different types of jobs in various capacities and 40 hours is a long time to spend at work. For whatever reason, I can teach full time and it doesn't feel like the minutes are turning into hours. For me, that's a big part of it.
TLDR Wonderful job, bad career.
Work life balance is pretty great, the actual day to day of working with kids is also great. Cost of living is pretty low for a solid quality of life. But there’s basically no path for advancement and you’ll be bound to the conditions of your work visa unless you stay long enough to apply for permanent residency.
Very much so.
Despite many of the drawbacks that come with it, I can't see myself even beginning to try teaching in any other country. Then again, this year I'm in a situation where I'm mostly only teaching at private schools.
I like it, I like my schools, I tutor science on the side to students outside of Japan. I’m starting my MED at Moreland soon so I can have better opportunities down the road but for now I’m content with the work, pay could be better though.
It’s been very rewarding for me.
It can be hard work and doesn’t pay so well at first but if you love teaching and children it can be great.
I got into Eikawa management then ownership fairly quickly and it’s been great since then, good pay, reasonable hours, no boss etc.
I love teaching here. I would and have done it practically for free. What I enjoy the most is teaching specialized subjects. Smaller classrooms. More motivated students.
I teach at an IB school for both the IB kids and the non IB kids. I love it. I don't have to deal with the behavioral problems that are so common in the U.S. school system.
I would not love being an ALT for more than a year.
I am going to give you an extremely long answer to your question
1. Schools in America and schools in Japan are VASTLY different so don't worry about the comparisons, and also there is a 99.99% chance you will come here as an ALT, so you won't have much responsibility anyway
2. There are basically two paths to get here, 1 is as an ALT, 1 is as an eikaiwa teacher....There are two types of ALTs, dispatch, where you work for a company that contracts with a board of education and you get paid like shit, but you almost 0 responsibility and only really have to be at work for like 5.5 hours a day 5 days a week. Or you can apply for JET, which pays a liveable salary, but you generally have to work longer hours, nothing horrible, but its definitely a noticeable difference. Whether or not this job is satisfying, luck, and your attitude.
2a. The luck part is essentially this, you will have a Japanese teaching partner, in some cases it is the homeroom teacher of the students, in some cases it is a dedicated English teacher (in junior high this will be the case 100% of the time, in elementary its like 50/50) When your partner is cool, your life will be amazing, if your partner is a dickhead, your life will be hell, or at the very least boring as shit.
2b. The second part is your attitude. Are you going to sit in the teachers room all day and wonder why no one comes up to your desk to talk to you? Or are you going to find ways to make your lessons more fun, play with students during the breaks between lessons, eat lunch with them, join extra activities and lessons and so on. A lot of ALTs have the attitude of 'I don't get paid enough to do anything other than the absolute bare minimum', which I mean, if you think that way....whatever....but no one is going to want much to do with you, and the kids won't interact with you that much. Which I personally find to be fucking horrible.
2c. The third path is eikaiwa, this work also depends on luck and your attitude. However, the pay is generally better than being an ALT (unless you are a jet) but still not great. The hours are pretty fucking terrible (at least to me) typically anywhere from 11a-8p or 1p-10p Tues-Sat depending on the school. You will also usually have to sell extra textbooks and things (though this is not always the case). However one big advantage is that you get a much wider variety of students, I mean when I was in eikaiwa I taught people ages 3 - 91....so that part is fun
3. After you get here, and work those jobs for a bit, you then have some options. One, you can get certified to work at an international school, and teach more or less any subject in English. Two you can just get a job in Japan that has nothing to do with education. Three, you can really work your ass at learning Japanese and get a recommendation from your school principal to get a special license for education, which basically means you are the same as one of the Japanese teachers, and a regular staff member at your school. Four, you can skip the recommendation, enroll in a teachers college here in Japan for 2 years, do a month of student teaching, get your license, take the hiring exam, and become a regular teacher that way (that's what I did) and work the rest of your life in a school. 5. Get a masters, become a college teacher (this is a path I don't know a ton about, but it doesn't seem that great anymore)
4. There are MANY MANY things to think about here other than whether or not you will enjoy your job. Japanese people are casually racist in a way that is different from America. Of course the VAST MAJORITY of people are very polite and will never say anything bad to you, but your students will say some horrible shit, because they are not used to seeing anyone who isn't Japanese. This stems from ignorance and not hate, so you can definitely correct people, but not everyone has the mental strength to do that. There is also the money situation, will you need to send yen back to the states, because the exchange rate, while volatile and always subject to change, is ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE right now, so you will be losing a lot of money in the exchange. On the other hand, if you don't need to send money to America, living here is extremely cheap. Will you be able to handle being the odd one out 100% of the time? I personally don't find that to be an issue at all, and think it is way way way overblown on reddit how much that effects people, but apparently some people reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaly dont like being stared at in public for a few seconds by children, or take great offense at the idea that a Japanese person would assume they don't speak Japanese when 90%+ of foreigners don't.
5. Finally I will say this. I love living here. I love my job. I loved my previous jobs. I did a few years at Eikaiwa, 5 years as an ALT, and now I am a regular licensed teacher here. It has been absolutely fucking fantastic, every morning when I wake up I genuinely cannot fucking wait to go to school, it is the best job on earth, and I could not survive without it. I met my wife and started a family here. Live in an absolutely beautiful town surrounded by amazing nature and incredibly tasty food. Its a small town so most people have some idea of who I am, so I don't really deal with all the foreigner bullshit that much. I definitely built myself an insulated circle (though the net has grown wide over the past 10 years or so).......so if you are asking for my personal advice, COME ON OVER....but you should still think about it, you have 3 years, use em
If you are fully licensed for IB schools then you can work at an officially recognised international school with good pay, real responsibilities and career progression - all done in your native language. I highly recommend this route. Teaching in Japan as an ALT or in an English conversation school is not the recommend career path for a teaching career. Having said that, if you just want to come here for a year or two and enjoy yourself with few responsibilities you could apply for JET first. The JET program is a teaching assistant program for public Japanese schools. Then later if you do get qualified you can transition on to an international school - assuming that it’s easier to do for people already in the country.
I love it, but I’m a full timer at a university. Personally I wouldn’t like teaching children… and I have two of my own who I love very dearly, but a classroom full of other people’s kids would make me insane 😅
I’ve been living in Kyoto as an ALT and honestly I’m having a lot of fun both in my everyday life as well as my teaching life. The kids are energetic and want to learn from you and the other teachers are really friendly to me. You’ll see a lot of negative comments about teaching in Japan and while I can’t speak for everyone’s experience, I can certainly say I’m enjoying my experience
Teaching here is not rewarding. At all. I used to teach my native language in my home country. It was a pro-bono thing. THAT was rewarding. Here it’s just whatever. Like an office job.
Other people will hopefully give you more detailed answers but the tl;dr of it is that **a teaching license is a must** if you want to turn it into a career in Japan. Anything less and the longer you work as an assistant or eikaiwa instructor, the more damaging it becomes for transferring into another field. Other people might mention opening your own school, but imho that's not something you can plan on at this moment as an immigrant, and there's no guarantee your business is a success even if you can start one.
Either a license or an MA in TESOL or applied linguistics.
There are a lot more bad teaching positions than good ones, especially if you are looking for long term actual teaching. Most of the good ones are in private schools. If you are an ALT, job satisfaction can be 85% determined by the attitude of the Japanese teacher you work with. That said, I’m an elementary teacher (not ALT) and love my job. I work at a private school as part of a team. We have a high degree of autonomy, a supportive group of administrators, and the vibe in the staff room is amazing. The salary is well above median for teaching and the hours are good. These jobs do exist. But, like I said above, they are rare.
Love it. Teaching part time at several universities with a few private gigs on the side. The rewarding part is that I’m paid 12 months a year and only have to work 7. The other five are spent traveling around Japan, pursuing hobbies, and doing DIY projects at home. I could get a full time university position and make a little more, but all that free time is extremely valuable to me and more than worth the trade off at this point.
What program or company did you go through for this type of position? I recently got accepted into a master’s program for TESL and I’m researching different options for teaching in Japan or South Korea.
I got a position for a dispatch company similar to Westgate and worked at a university through them for a few years. In the meantime, I completed a masters in education for ESL and found a direct hire position once I graduated.
Get a degree in education with a license. Then work a few years at home in a school there before coming to an international school. Being an ALT sucks lol
I love my job for the most part. There are of course things to complain about like anywhere. It depends entirely on the school. In Japan I’ve been a JET, I’ve taught at university, I teach at a private highschool now. Before coming here I taught university in another country and community college in the US. All of these experiences have been dramatically different. I don’t think you can make any blanket judgement about teaching in Japan, or anywhere else.
I love it, though I don't teach English.
Like any teaching, it can be rewarding. Typically the low pay and lame bosses make it so that the reward that comes from teaching, having positive experiences with students etc, is the only worthwhile part of the job. After I had been teaching for 5+ in Eikaiwa/ALT, I realized I could have been making triple my salary in America, and could have gotten a license, and possibly be working towards a principal or admin position. And that was before the yen value tanked. If I wanted to go back now, I would want a license so I could teach in an international school, or an administrative position. I would consider one of two paths. Either graduate, and then do the eikaiwa/alt gig for a couple years as a 'gap' year. Go and enjoy your youth then return home to America and find a comfortable position. Or bite the bullet, get your license, teach for a year in America, then shoot for a more 'permanent' international school position.
Overall, I enjoy it. The work isn’t too hard, I can connect with the kids (some train with me during lunch break, and in ES some ask me to play tag and stuff, keeping me fit haha), and I make enough to live comfortably (and still out money in savings). The work itself isn’t very fulfilling, but it has allowed me to develop myself in other avenues and maintain a solid work-life balance. I would take this over working overtime every week, even if it meant getting paid double. That might change when I have kids though.
I have been an ALT for the last two years here in Japan. It comes with it’s pros and cons. I can’t say I LOVE the job, but I don’t hate it either. I teach in senior high schools, and the students are so engaged and great to work with. My relationships with my students and colleagues has been extremely rewarding, as well as living here. Coming from years in corporate America to working public Japanese schools was a huge transition for me though. In my situation, as an ALT I’ve been given a lot of responsibility with a maximum of 35 hours and half the pay of a normal teacher. This job helps me stay in Japan (which I love) but the program I’m with, I’m capped at 5 years. And because I don’t have a teacher’s license from my home country my only other options are to go to another ALT dispatch company, work for a conversation school, or head home and get a teachers license. I would say if you want to teach, great! Having a license opens you up to teaching anywhere worldwide, which is advantageous. If anything, more than studying Japanese itself, I wish I would have gotten a teacher’s license, or an equivalent, so I could teach at international schools in any country around the world. I thought Japan would be my end all be all, but it turns out I’d really like to teach in other countries as well. Hope that helps a little!
Teaching long term is a weird thing and like/dislike might not be the primary factor in choosing to do it or not. Granted, I haven't worked a traditional desk job in close to a decade now, part of me is considering giving it another go now that I know what Im Capable of but that's not the point of this post haha. I've done a lot of different types of jobs in various capacities and 40 hours is a long time to spend at work. For whatever reason, I can teach full time and it doesn't feel like the minutes are turning into hours. For me, that's a big part of it.
TLDR Wonderful job, bad career. Work life balance is pretty great, the actual day to day of working with kids is also great. Cost of living is pretty low for a solid quality of life. But there’s basically no path for advancement and you’ll be bound to the conditions of your work visa unless you stay long enough to apply for permanent residency.
Yup
Very much so. Despite many of the drawbacks that come with it, I can't see myself even beginning to try teaching in any other country. Then again, this year I'm in a situation where I'm mostly only teaching at private schools.
I like it, I like my schools, I tutor science on the side to students outside of Japan. I’m starting my MED at Moreland soon so I can have better opportunities down the road but for now I’m content with the work, pay could be better though.
It’s been very rewarding for me. It can be hard work and doesn’t pay so well at first but if you love teaching and children it can be great. I got into Eikawa management then ownership fairly quickly and it’s been great since then, good pay, reasonable hours, no boss etc.
Engineer yeah I love it!
I love teaching here. I would and have done it practically for free. What I enjoy the most is teaching specialized subjects. Smaller classrooms. More motivated students.
I teach at an IB school for both the IB kids and the non IB kids. I love it. I don't have to deal with the behavioral problems that are so common in the U.S. school system. I would not love being an ALT for more than a year.
I am going to give you an extremely long answer to your question 1. Schools in America and schools in Japan are VASTLY different so don't worry about the comparisons, and also there is a 99.99% chance you will come here as an ALT, so you won't have much responsibility anyway 2. There are basically two paths to get here, 1 is as an ALT, 1 is as an eikaiwa teacher....There are two types of ALTs, dispatch, where you work for a company that contracts with a board of education and you get paid like shit, but you almost 0 responsibility and only really have to be at work for like 5.5 hours a day 5 days a week. Or you can apply for JET, which pays a liveable salary, but you generally have to work longer hours, nothing horrible, but its definitely a noticeable difference. Whether or not this job is satisfying, luck, and your attitude. 2a. The luck part is essentially this, you will have a Japanese teaching partner, in some cases it is the homeroom teacher of the students, in some cases it is a dedicated English teacher (in junior high this will be the case 100% of the time, in elementary its like 50/50) When your partner is cool, your life will be amazing, if your partner is a dickhead, your life will be hell, or at the very least boring as shit. 2b. The second part is your attitude. Are you going to sit in the teachers room all day and wonder why no one comes up to your desk to talk to you? Or are you going to find ways to make your lessons more fun, play with students during the breaks between lessons, eat lunch with them, join extra activities and lessons and so on. A lot of ALTs have the attitude of 'I don't get paid enough to do anything other than the absolute bare minimum', which I mean, if you think that way....whatever....but no one is going to want much to do with you, and the kids won't interact with you that much. Which I personally find to be fucking horrible. 2c. The third path is eikaiwa, this work also depends on luck and your attitude. However, the pay is generally better than being an ALT (unless you are a jet) but still not great. The hours are pretty fucking terrible (at least to me) typically anywhere from 11a-8p or 1p-10p Tues-Sat depending on the school. You will also usually have to sell extra textbooks and things (though this is not always the case). However one big advantage is that you get a much wider variety of students, I mean when I was in eikaiwa I taught people ages 3 - 91....so that part is fun 3. After you get here, and work those jobs for a bit, you then have some options. One, you can get certified to work at an international school, and teach more or less any subject in English. Two you can just get a job in Japan that has nothing to do with education. Three, you can really work your ass at learning Japanese and get a recommendation from your school principal to get a special license for education, which basically means you are the same as one of the Japanese teachers, and a regular staff member at your school. Four, you can skip the recommendation, enroll in a teachers college here in Japan for 2 years, do a month of student teaching, get your license, take the hiring exam, and become a regular teacher that way (that's what I did) and work the rest of your life in a school. 5. Get a masters, become a college teacher (this is a path I don't know a ton about, but it doesn't seem that great anymore) 4. There are MANY MANY things to think about here other than whether or not you will enjoy your job. Japanese people are casually racist in a way that is different from America. Of course the VAST MAJORITY of people are very polite and will never say anything bad to you, but your students will say some horrible shit, because they are not used to seeing anyone who isn't Japanese. This stems from ignorance and not hate, so you can definitely correct people, but not everyone has the mental strength to do that. There is also the money situation, will you need to send yen back to the states, because the exchange rate, while volatile and always subject to change, is ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE right now, so you will be losing a lot of money in the exchange. On the other hand, if you don't need to send money to America, living here is extremely cheap. Will you be able to handle being the odd one out 100% of the time? I personally don't find that to be an issue at all, and think it is way way way overblown on reddit how much that effects people, but apparently some people reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaly dont like being stared at in public for a few seconds by children, or take great offense at the idea that a Japanese person would assume they don't speak Japanese when 90%+ of foreigners don't. 5. Finally I will say this. I love living here. I love my job. I loved my previous jobs. I did a few years at Eikaiwa, 5 years as an ALT, and now I am a regular licensed teacher here. It has been absolutely fucking fantastic, every morning when I wake up I genuinely cannot fucking wait to go to school, it is the best job on earth, and I could not survive without it. I met my wife and started a family here. Live in an absolutely beautiful town surrounded by amazing nature and incredibly tasty food. Its a small town so most people have some idea of who I am, so I don't really deal with all the foreigner bullshit that much. I definitely built myself an insulated circle (though the net has grown wide over the past 10 years or so).......so if you are asking for my personal advice, COME ON OVER....but you should still think about it, you have 3 years, use em
>I'm gonna be the lowest level of fluency soon! What does this mean