Hello, so we have a long time family friend (in her early 40s) who has only ever worked retail jobs before until she managed to get to a position where she could start attending school to be a teacher. She does plan on teaching in the US, but has had a lifelong dream of teaching in Japan and Korea. (Familial ties to both countries iirc) She has about one more year of classes left. Trying to reassure her it’ll be fine as I just had another friend in his early 30s land a job at a private school there with 0 teaching experience and a completely unrelated degree, but looking for more input.
Will her job history and age make this difficult as a fresh grad? If so, how long should she teach here in the states before moving on? She’s been studying both Japanese and Korean language for several years now as well, though I couldn’t tell you how fluent she is in either.
4 comments
She’ll be fine. Honestly having some customer service experience and a bit of the language/culture under her belt should make it pretty easy. I know people who have started jobs here around the same age.
She doesn’t really need a teaching degree or experience although it does help. Most English teaching jobs for fresh grads or new employees are pretty basic.
I haven’t taught in Japan. But I am teaching in Korea. Korea is pretty judgemental the closer to you get to Seoul. There can be really great jobs out there for people that don’t fit the standard of what schools want in a foreign teacher but they are hard to find. I’ve had some pretty terrible employers in Korea judge me based on weight. So putting that out there. Because no one was ever honest about that part in Korea with me and it really sucked dealing with it after I committed to a full year of it.
I have experience in the corporate world before my teaching in Japan at interac. I was 38 when I first arrived in Japan in 2018. She will be fine. I was the oldest at the in person demonstration and only saw 1 other ALT that got hired out of 20 that was present at the demo.