Pros
This all depends on the city you live in. I have heard that you are treated very well and are expected to get great job opportunities for your merit in certain cities. At the city I was at, they trained you heavily at the beginning and there was continuous development to help you improve your goals. I met a lot of friendly staff and it was great to deal with the students and parents on a regular basis.
Cons
As an experienced teacher, I thought the training was too much. Afterwards when you are teaching you are expected to do development tasks. Often it felt like a test. I never felt like I was developing naturally, it felt forced. Soon after working at the company I noticed a lot of foreign teachers leaving. I was in the company 6 months and over 20 members of staff left based on unfair treatment or discrimination. I have seen PAs and teachers used as scapegoats because of poor management decisions. Often the teaching schedule was made at the last minute meaning it was difficult to plan in advance. If you weren’t happy with a management decision a senior manager would state the terms of the contract in front of all employees to make you fall in line rather than help you solve the problem or provide you with an incentive to work. Often if you wanted to gain a job promotion you had to suck up to management than do things based on merit. Often management would lie about job opportunities. In my city alone there were plenty of places with job opportunities, but instead they would rather have one person run more than 1 school than train someone else to take over a school. I also saw people being told that they would be trained for senior positions, only to see brand new teachers given senior positions and then other teachers being held back. There was a lot of discrimination as well. Teachers that were of other ethnic backgrounds left because they couldn’t get a job promotion based on their skin color. For demo lessons CCs would dictate who would do the demos based on their skin color. They would pretty much say they wanted white Foreign teachers only for demos because they believed that parents were less likely to buy a course if someone from a non-white background was doing the demo. Often people are over worked. A school in my city pretty much revolted against the company because they were being over worked and mistreated by management. When people finally decide to leave based on unfair treatment, senior management and HR would make it incredibly difficult for you to sort out your visa with a new employee. HR have refused to cooperate with my new employee and have done the bare minimum to help transfer my visa because they say their duty is limited in what they can do. Rather than end on good terms to avoid a review like this, they would rather stress you out by preventing you sorting your visa out effectively. The reason why I left was down to not being paid on time. 3 times in a row I was paid late and it involved several attempts to communicate with the finance department to fix the issue each time. What annoys me the most is I left because I wasn’t paid on time, which in its self is a breach of contract. When I decide to leave to go elsewhere the company would rather make my life hell than to actually leave on good terms. I am extremely disappointed with this company, especially when I still have good relations with previous companies I have worked for.
