Pros
My overall experience at my centre was pretty good. I had a wonderful manager, and a really great teaching team. This was at my specific centre. There is not too much planning for an English teacher, since there are pre-made presentations that you have to follow. I was never really over-loaded with work. Always paid on time. Visa process was fairly easy. If you just want to get a year of exeperience and don’t really care about ethics, this could be the company for you.
Cons
This is a corporation, not a school by any means. The company should be renamed Money First. Students are referred to as customers. Centres have specific staff that are called ‘student consultants,’ and they’re assigned to a number of students to help with their development. Couldn’t be farther from the case. They will baby the students for the first month (refund period,) and then after that will give occasional update meetings, for which they are not trained at all for. The worst part is that they’re job is centred around sales (remember sales is not in their title.) Because of their extremely low salary, they have to make commission, which they make off of getting referrals from current students, and then getting students to extend their contracts. In terms of salary, it’s not bad for an interntational teacher, but if you compare it to other large teaching centres and schools in shanghai, EF is definitely one of the lowest paid. But that brings me to the local teachers salary. This international company can get away with paying local wages, so they Chinese people that I worked with and did the SAME exact job as me, were getting paid less than the US minimum wage. Now let’s talk about hierarchy. EF HQ is by far the worst part of this company. Any initiative that is thought up by HQ MUST be implemented at centre level, no matter the amount of kickback from teachers. As teachers you would think that we would know what’s best for our students, but those wishes are drowned out by sales initiatives. My centre was quite far from HQ, so I think in my two years maybe two people came down from HQ. There is no communication between us and them, and they’re the ones constantly pushing out questionable things. And now for quality of EF branded education....big yikes. The presenations that make up most of the classes for students are for the most part, pretty trash. The teachers and I were constantly making supplementary materials, trying to find out why the class didn’t theoretically work, and even though we found solutions to most, there are even some that are simply unteachable they’re so bad. If the people who made those lessons can call themselves linguists, then I can call myself a practicing neuro-surgeon. I’ve met tons of other EF teachers, and I can say that I’ve never met someone with a positive opinion of the company. I’ve even met ‘teacher ambassadors,’ who were unimpressed with management. I’ll leave off by saying that I have TONS more to say, but just not enough time or space. PS- to the EF employee tasked with doing damage control on negative reviews, hit me up baby I’m ready to dispute.
