Moving back to home country – how to sell “teaching English” on your resume?

18 comments

1. >How can you pivot to a more, hire-earning career after spending many years in Japan?

   The honest answer is to have a career in Japan where you can develop the skills and build the experience you need to attract attention in your target market. Unfortunately, after 7 years as an ALT the only transferable skill you may have is Japanese. Good luck.

2. Say you were a copywriter for a PR company creating and finishing press releases for Japanese companies in English. Put down a Japanese PR company as your ex-employer.

3. You are a university teacher. You have many hard skills. The question is are you going into education as a career or the private sector? Private sector you want to emphasize skills related to the field. Marketing skills, did you make anything ever for your schools or university? That’s campaign development, or however you can spin it. Accounting, did you have to organize and manage an abudant amount of student files or data? That organizational skills will compound with a quick cert or your degree whatever it is. Going into education? Well you’re a university professor, not “teaching english”

4. I’m not sure what state you live in, but you could look into alternative routes for state teaching certification possibly. Your experience teaching English would be very desirable and you would make somewhat decent money. You might be able to get a job as an international student advisor at a community college or university. You could change careers completely and learn how to code or do something in tech that might pay more. As a teacher you have a lot of different skills such as communication, collaboration, analyzing information to make informed decisions (such as measuring student progress), ability to adapt to change, creative thinking/innovation, organization and time management, goal setting and planning, customer service skills, etc.

5. Lie? As long as your are confident you can do the job then theres room to lie on your cv. Companies lie all the time, monkey see monkey do.

6. They’ll laugh at you and tell you to grow up

7. Message me. I will hook you up with a remote job.

8. > How can you pivot to a more, hire-earning career after spending many years in Japan?

   In short I tried very hard but couldn’t immediately (despite being a qualified teacher + having an M. TESOL, so able to apply for ‘real’ teaching jobs as well as ‘real’ ESL gigs). I’m now a lawyer… not a ‘mega rich’ one but earning many times more what I did prior. My steps involved:

   – Taking whatever job I could get. One may laugh but the highest paid gig I got involved teaching English in prisons (roughly 12,000 an hour – often I’d get locked in there overnight and the hours would just keep clocking over). My lesson from this was to be open to anything if you need some coin.

   – My dream was to be in some sorta e-learning role. I got interviewed but never scored any of those jobs. Got me sorta depressed as I have a 2nd masters in e-learning so saw that as my ‘specialisation’. While in the prison I setup some e-learning modules on their internal network (put some smarter prisoners to work helping with the development too). I thought this was quite innovative but it went nowhere and got no appreciation (that’s life I suppose).

   – For stability I took a junior IT gig that was full-time with benefits rather than a risky contracting job. My pay went down significantly but it was easy and stable. Again… open to anything I suppose. While working in IT I studied law.

   – While re-training I took an admin role (even lower pay) within the same organisation’s legal area. Again I was hoping they’d make me a ‘lawyer’ once I graduated and got admitted as a lawyer. Nup! They used me as one but paid me as a junior admin dude, while bluntly rejecting all my applications for promotion.

   – To get outta the above cycle I applied for graduate programs (yep you guessed it… EVEN LOWER pay, but with an accelerated path to promotion). By doing so I got a choice of quite impressive organisations and developed within one. I’ve now moved around a bit and am relatively ‘senior’ but it wasn’t some liner path.

   Not saying ALTs and the like should all take my path. Guess my message is to be open and not be disheartened if you can’t get decent cash right after going home. Follow your dreams, keep trying new stuff and stay genki.

   I personally advise against training a teacher as (in my experience) I was pretty tired of teaching after being in Japan and despite having qualifications, it was pretty disheartening trying to apply for even junior teaching roles (nobody valued my experience as being something a little bit fun/unique… I got really depressed about this). In the long-run I’m glad I didn’t persist with teaching as it’s simply not the right job for me. I’d achieved everything I wanted to in teaching and it would not challenge/excite me if I was doing it today.

9. I was in the same boat, but without the Masters. When I moved back I did some freelance work teaching English to foreigners who came to the US to do contract work for companies like Procter and Gamble. It was fine but I only did that as a side gig. At my “real” job I was able to sell my experience in Japan as a display of my organizational skills, adaptability, and willingness to teach and train, and I moved up the chain there pretty quickly to the point where in a year I was already making more than what I had made in Japan. Five years later I’m much better off financially than what I could have ever managed in Japan. I’m not rolling in dough or anything, but I’m stable.

   Whatever job you go for I would try to sell your skills that way to get leadership roles.

10. What are you looking to do? That will determine exactly how you spin your experience in Japan.

    Until you let us know more than “jump into the private sector”, we’re only going to be able to give you general statements.

    What do you want to do in America?

11. [deleted]

12. You have a masters and a solid background in education. It feels like you’re downplaying your accomplishments a bit, they’re not too shabby. It might be hard to pivot to a new field if you’re thinking of leaving education, but you have many hard skills as a teacher and soft skills when it comes to leadership, delegation, and presentation/research.

13. >I should specify I’m hoping to jump into the private sector, not continue in education

    Emphasize hard skills. Over the course of your career in Japan, I’m sure you’ve become proficient in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Zoom/Teams, some kind of learning management system like Blackboard or Google Classroom, as well as other software like Kahoots/Quizlet. Although the odds of you using Quizlet in your next job are essentially zero, being handy with software is a transferrable skill.

    You can also toot your own horn about your soft skills. You learned people management skills by dealing with large groups of students, right? You’re good at planning and executing due to your experience with creating lesson plans and carrying them out in class, I’m sure. Your communication skills have been sharpened (in a challenging foreign language environment, no less!) by contributing to the many meetings you’ve attended (or even led! Shh, they won’t know).

    There you go.

    For anyone else reading this and thinks ALTing or working in an eikaiwa is a waste of time: all of this can also apply to ALT and eikaiwa work.

14. To be honest – teaching English in Japan, even at university level, is not given much weight back home. Unless you are able to get an equivalent job teaching at a university in the US (which is unlikely given that you only have a Masters degree), you’ll either have to retrain or accept the fact that you’ll have take a pay cut.

15. You can try and find jobs in Hawaii that require Japanese. Knowing Japanese in Hawaii is like knowing Spanish on the mainland US.

    But depending on where you live in Hawaii, the cost pf living will eat up your salary. Heck, in most major cities, your salary would be eaten.

16. All the English teachers/Uni workers that worked in Japan that went back to the USA are now making more money than they were in Japan. So the people here who are saying you’ll only work at Wal-Mart don’t have a grasp of the market in the USA (maybe they’ve been here in Japan too long?)

    I also totally get why you’re apprehensive. Many people think full-time Uni jobs are the “golden goose” but in reality this may not be true.

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    1.Contracts usually only last 3-5 years so you have to move around a lot and don’t have stability. This leads to a lack of stability and lateral movements, career-wise

    2. Tenure is getting rarer and rarer and positions are getting more and more competitive.

    3. Teaching English at University in Japan isn’t exactly difficult/stimulating/fulfilling. Some people like this but if you’re ambitious, this can lead to problems.

    4. Average Uni full time would be around 6 million. This is a “fine” salary but it’s not an “excellent” salary. It looks good compared to ALT (which is poverty) but again, if you’re ambitious and want a bigger house, expensive vacations, nice school for children, nicer car etc you’ll be unfulfilled. Some people are content, others are not. Sounds like you’re not. As you said, you probably don’t get higher than that (yeah, maybe tenure/international school but that is rare)

    I’m assuming you’re not doing the IT path because you can do that here in Japan. Assuming you’re not and looking for something more “corporate”…

    Obviously, you don’t put “teach English” on your resume but you spin it so it fits the job you’re looking for. (Business, marketing etc). With that said, you have some hurdles

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    1. The difficulty is getting interviews while you’re overseas – companies don’t usually take that risk for obvious reasons. You may have to take a month to go to the USA to job hunt(you do get long vacations, right?), then move or move to the city if you get a job or move there for a month or two and search after you move (risky but doable), Some countries may interview you overseas but most will opt not to
    2. Having Japanese companies probably doesn’t help you as much for job experience/references. I would recommend getting a certificate or two to bolster your resume. The link below has some popular certificates for various industries you may be interested in (marketing, project management, HR, business analyst). Consider getting at least one of these (many you can do online).

    https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/certifications-in-demand

17. How did you transition to university? Any tips to someone who wants to move from ALT to a different career in Japan?

18. While I am not sure how well your skills as an ALT/ University instructor would transfer over to the private sector, I do think that you will be able to transition to a decent work environment and salary back home if you try to work in the education sector. Have you ever thought of working as an advisor for an international student center, or for the study abroad department at a college or university? With your skills of living and working overseas, you can help people prepare for cross-cultural opportunities like incoming Japanese/ foreign exchange students living in the US or US college students who want to study and live in Japan.

    This is something one of my acquaintances has done after working as an ALT in Korea for two years, she went back to work, at the university where she graduated from, as a student advisor.