Pros
They pay for your flight, tefl certificate and have online training. Some of the teachers events were good. Some of the training sessions were good. The online interface and smart boards are good. Most of the kids were great to teach.
Cons
EF does not care about Education. They are a corporation concerned with profits and appeasing a bunch of ‘teachers’ looking for a traveling experience. If you are placed at a new school you may be the only foreign teacher there, and you may be an hour train ride away from any friends you made at orientation. EF barely lets you read the contract before you sign it once you arrive. They basically force you into a start up loan so you have to stay to pay them back. Many of the people who work there, particular the managers, are incredibly unprofessional and demanding. They took credit for my work after basically throwing me in the deep end when I went there with limited teaching experience. Watch out if you’re not American or British, because they will constantly tell you that your pronunciation and the way you use English is ‘incorrect’. A lot of the people who work there are incredibly rude and horrible to work with. They spread rumors about anyone and everyone. It was made almost impossible for me to have a social life there. Over the summer school period I sometimes worked 40 teaching hours a week (this did not include office or planning hours), which I was barely paid extra for. The other teachers at my first centre worked a lot less hours than me. I worked up to 28 teaching hours during the regular teaching times. The training is often repetitive. My first manager repeatedly said offensive things to me. I put in two complaints when I worked there and these were taken out of context, made to look ridiculous and passed on to other companies I applied to. The company does not like to be criticized. They place other EF teachers in apartments around you so you will have little to no privacy. The teachers that have been there for a while treat the offices like their own personal playgrounds and the foreign teachers often verbally abuse the Chinese admin staff and harass any staff they consider beneath them. The Chinese staff repay the favor to any staff they think it’s okay to harass. I was harassed, belittled and bullied during my time there by sections of both the foreign and Chinese staff. They are a corrupt company with abuses of power and no check and balance system in place. They conduct their own reviews on themself and no surprise, they always find that they are right and have done nothing wrong. They cancelled my transfer to a different city weeks before my contract ended, which meant that I had not organised another job in time to avoid a period of unemployment.
