The ESL thing is the worst thing I ever did in my life

30 comments

1. Feel like I am heading down this road. Friend offered me a job 5 or 6 years ago at his families QA company. Entry pay was meh but rose fast. Still decided not too because I the idea of sitting in front of a computer all day just naa. Now my friend is making 6 digits as a product manager. Not sure I would get that high, but it easily would be worth more than I do now. Though the day to day job would have sucked. Now I finished my masters and hoping to turn this ESL thing into something. Had a year as a licensed teacher and made decent money but had to give that up because of life things.

2. It sounds like working on a new skill in the last ten years might have helped build your resume, did you not learn any new skills? Some people go back to school, perfect their newfound language, learn a trade (like coding) etc. Also you could always go back into your old field, now with a new language added.

3. Just on the flip side, there’s nothing wrong with going back to your home country and “starting over,” even if at an advanced age. I would imagine the opportunity to work your way up the career ladder back home is perhaps much more possible than the EFL climbing in Japan.

   A few buddies of mine decided to leave the industry, go back to the states, and spent a year rebuilding (stayed at an Airbnb, reestablished residence status, strung a few contract jobs, and got mid-level management jobs shortly thereafter). Before COVID, they would come to visit Japan twice a year with actual vacation money.

   EFL in Japan is slowly rotting away (well, accelerating with ChatGPT being rampant, but that’s a different thread). At the same time, if you really love what you do within the industry, I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it work.

4. Can you speak the language? That becomes a lot more valuable back over in America if you look in the right areas.

5. Maybe it wasn’t the ESL experience itself so much as it was the lack of skill and professional development along the way. Did you learn the language and research new roles to grow into long term?

6. Having the skills as a software developer is a good place to start isn’t it? It might be sitting in front of a computer, but there are plenty of options available. Especially if you speak the language.

   Get out there and hone some of those skills and get them back up. You might feel down, but you’re never out. Get at it and grind your way back up. You can do it!

7. Youve worked in an industry for 10 years and you havent developed any new skills? What have you been doing this whole time?

8. I know it can be daunting. I think you can look at it a few different ways, one being that you’re fucked and you have no hope and you ruined everything by spending 10 years abroad drinking chuhi and shirking adult responsibilities. Or you can look at it like you gained some valuable experience, you made some friends along the way, and you had a good time. Don’t regret the decision you made, just deal with where you’re at. Maybe it’ll take some extra work to get where you wanna go next. So what? Problem solve. Maybe you can leverage some of those friendships you made into a gig somewhere.

9. Get skills. Relocate. You have the power to make yourself more employable.

10. This is why I try my best to tell newcomers that they need to be very careful. It’s easy to enjoy Japan, think you want to live here permanently, and then in 10 years find yourself with a wife, kids, and stuck in a dead-end eikiawa job with a falling salary and no way to go back to your former profession without significant investment in time and money to get new, more recent qualifications.

    If you don’t want to be a teacher, then don’t get sucked into it for more than a couple of years at most.

    If you do want to be a teacher, then get qualified so that when you’re bored to tears with eikaiwa or ALT work, you can become a homeroom teacher or move into tertiary education.

11. You resume isnt fucked you just need to find any single thing you did and make it sounds good. You ever filled out a class record online? Well theres your “experienced admin” ever taken a kids temperature? Well theres your “extensive health and safety experience” etc etc

12. Are you considering going back to home country? I’d suggest:

    1. Pop on Coursera and find a few courses or short program that is both of interest to you and gives you some skills or knowledge you can use in a job.
    2. Do you teach Eikaiwa and do lessons with business people? Start subtly making the lesson topics lean more towards business or political discussion topics, not straight conversation. Listen for nuggets of processes, government procedures, current information. Store those nuggets. See if you can steer or offer to help them with presentations in English by checking script or slides. When they mention theyr are going overseas for a busness trip, toss them some tips for their travel.
    3. Parley this into some resume job titles and experiences that indicate you spent years advising corporate executives and staff on cross-cultural communication. Say you facilitated professional discussion and strategic planning on…(whatever businesses your students tell you about).

13. Here’s an idea: go do ESL in some other country for a bit and work on your quals at the same time.

14. The longer you spend as an Eikawa monkey/ALT, the worse it looks on your resume. 8 years ALT/Eikawa amounts to absolutely nothing

    Don’t like this fact? Then you should move back or move into a superior industry pronto.

15. If you do choose to move back to America I recommend starting a temp agency and gaining skills for your profession. While you are at the temp agencies you can ask for a path that can get you experience in your field. If you choose to continue with education you may even be able to get a mid tier job. Also there is a teacher shortage. For example, where my friend is a teacher with no experience or teaching degree.

16. I think that you could be working on tech stuff and doing contract work to break into that career path. I see a lot of remote front-end work being posted in Japan.

17. Lots of call for IT and software development in Japan, maybe you could pivot to that? Alternately, you could look into getting an advanced degree and moving into teaching university or business English? Start your own practice?

18. My advice is to aim to find a job in a multi-national company in Japan that has a reputation back home. Use that to get your skills back in the game. Then decide what you want to do.

19. > …after a short few years of being single, bored in a shithole city with high crime and needing a reason to live I just headed overseas. Now after 10 yearsI feel like I’m stuck. My resume is totally fucked up and without serious technical skills at my age it seems impossible to break back into a halfway decent job and especially not even being located in the US…

    Seems more like your challenge is that you’ve waited 10 years without making a plan. At some point you’ve just gotta bite the bullet and go home.

    You’ve said it yourself that you were in a pretty shit situation before you left (which is okay – we all were). I wouldn’t romanticise some random support desk role. You’ve had a rest from this life… now what?

    It sounds like it’s time to go home. Yes the job market’s hard (always will be) and other people your age who’ve had 10 years of progression will be in more senior roles. That said, you probably woulda been in this same position if you’d stayed on an IT support desk for 10 years (i.e. dead bored and sick of the life around you). No employer’s gonna fix that for you. You’ve gotta take the initiative to go where the work is and start applying. I don’t think blaming EFL for your predicament’s gonna get you anywhere… if you hate it then get out.

20. Old guy here. I have been having to tell people for the last 15 years, Do NOT come to Japan to teach English. Ever since Interact etc. got into the game, it has been a race to the bottom. Back in the day, 1989, I started with Berlitz. Making 400-500,000 yen/month was easy, if you wanted to put in the hours. My neighbor was a direct hire at a university, she made 1,000,000 yen/month. I knew a couple who worked here for 10 years, lived frugally, and left with 1,000,000 dollars. Another guy bought himself a house on the beach in Hawaii. Teaching in Japan has become a caricature, and a very low paying one at that. A salary of 200,000 yen/month is going to attract what kind of person? Even the so called good jobs at JET or BOE have turned into a shit show. If you want to come here for a year or 2, hang out , have some fun. Sure. If you are looking for a place to live, raise a family, buy a house. It is never going to happen teaching English. Sorry, but this how it is in Japan now.

21. Yeah it sucks but don’t worry you’re not stuck there. Life is a pretty open-ended thing with an infinite amount of possibilities. I left Japan after 5 years to go back to the US, was essentially homeless for a while but just started grinding on the gig economy and made way more than i’d ever be making doing esl in Japan.

    It’s gonna be extremely uncomfortable for a while, you’ll be financially unstable and probably have to downgrade your living standards for a while but that is life. People in the US are struggling just as much if not more than you are as an English teacher in Japan. You just gotta put things into perspective and get clear with your vision

22. Sorry to take away from your post, but do you know of any other jobs that an American can apply for in japan that isn’t teaching?

23. Here’s the 2 year plan to having a $75K+ USD a year career with benefits and 10+ weeks a year of vacation

    1. Get out of Japan (I recommend China, no matter what level)
    2. Earn money you can save and use to improve your career
    3. Get your US Teaching License online (Teacher Ready, Teach Now, whatever)
    4. Get into Int. Schools and build up skills and reps (2 years of int school teaching)
    5. Do everything in your power to get IB-Certified

    After that you’ll be set up to return to your home country, work in any country at a high level, and control your future

24. If you did anything like software developing and you’re willing to do it again, go back to the US. Go get some certificates, and start over. You still have time if you’re like under 35.

    Hopefully, those 10 years will at least have helped you understand what you WANT to do. If it’s not software development, go get a Ba or a few certs in your desired field of study and try to find a job.

25. >no financial means to support myself or buy a house or retire

    I know the pay is shit, but even I was able to put away 40 or 50,000 yen a month as an ALT. This one’s on you.

26. Well you said yourself you needed a reason to live, thats pretty serious ay?
    Your still american and your country should support its residents/people, just cause you havent achivied financial independence does not mean you made a poor decision, some things are more important than money. Long term yeah maybe you did the wrong thing, but bigger picture than that, you put your mental health first, thats a win. Better to die standing or then live on your knees…theres no use crying over spilt milk

27. You are regretting it now, but if you disliked your old job enough to quit back then, then you would probably be on another forum now complaining that you are stuck in your job and never got a chance to live overseas. Find a way to move forward instead of getting stuck in your own head.

28. It’s early 2023. Set yourself a goal that on one year (by early 2024) you will be doing something different. Use this year to apply, refine your resume, hone your skills and most importantly, obtain qualifications/degrees/certificates. Don’t *think* about doing these, actually do them

    You will need to put in effort but it’s possible to escape teaching English, even after 10 years doing it.

29. Thanks for sharing your experience.

30. I’ve known a few people who have left Japan to return to their home countries after several years here teaching EFL. Jobs that they are now doing are various: a plumber (he went back to school, apprenticed and is now a licensed tradesman / manager of a contracting outfit), police officers, a lawyer, licensed teachers, truck driver, physics / science tutor, university librarian (earned a master’s in library & information after going back home). There are more, but I forget. These are just the ones off the top of my head. The point is, they all had to go back and do some kind of training or go back to school to earn certificates / degrees in order to get their current jobs. It probably wasn’t easy, but they did it. So can you.