Is there a massive shortage of licensed teachers from English speaking countries in Japan right now?
School have advertised in the usual places, and ended up also using recruitment agencies, but have made it to December without finding anyone able to teach Maths and Science.
Have people gone home and not been replaced due to COVID, or is the weak yen making it easier to work in other places?
Or have the recruitment agencies just done an awful job of looking in the wrong places?
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The working conditions just aren’t good enough to attract teachers. Long hours plus comparatively dismal pay compared to many other countries.
Not really a shortage of qualified teachers. It’s a shortage of pay. If you pay enough, you’ll get someone good.
For English teaching, anyone with an actual license from their home country and/or an MA in language/education is woefully overqualified for nearly any English “business” industry job (Eikaiwa, ALT, etc.) which is nearly always unlicensed or limited licensed work anyway. The pay, conditions, standards/practices, and other workers in the field are all far lower/low quality than would be expected in their home country so there’s not much a reason for a licensed educator to even glance at the English business industry.
For general direct hire for a subject teacher in an actual teacher position, licensure usually isn’t require beyond a provisional license that’s more of an admin check box than it is a qualification. Those positions still aren’t as well compensated or secure as what a licensed teacher would get in their home country, which would at least come with benefits and a long term contract.
For international schools (legit ones), they hire from outside of the country and are hyper competitive, there are also very few of them in Japan so the amount of foreign teachers circulating around Japan with licensure for working at an int’l school is low.
A big barrier to having more licensed foreign teachers in Japan is how ridiculous it is to get anything resembling a full teacher’s license here as a foreigner. The only two routes that exist are getting the extremely rare “special” license which is given out more based on need rather than qualifications, and the “normal” license that requires you to graduate from a Japanese university and to pass through the standardized teacher licensure program.
I suspect its a discrepency between qualifications and pay. Licensed teachers are not going to work at the same level as traditional Japanese teachers while making the same wages as a full time shift manager at McDonald’s in their home countries.
Japan is starting to get hit with inflation but salaries have remained stagnant/declined. There is no reason for a licensed and professional teacher who would presumably be in the middle of his or her career, to come to Japan for work.
> Is there a massive shortage of licensed teachers from English speaking countries in Japan right now?
Is there a demand for them? I’d be thinking that it’s difficult for private schools to get experienced teachers with fluent Japanese and experience teaching more specialised subjects in sandstone private schools… maybe?
Joe gaijin with a fresh degree from a random liberal arts college, a quick & dirty teaching diploma, a provisional teaching license, ‘I reckon my Japanese is about N2 coz I can order a ramen’, some weed and a guitar? Probably not a lot of demand.
>Is there a massive shortage of licensed teachers from English speaking countries in Japan right now?
I know there a shortage of Japanese teacher in public schools for sure but idk about foreign teachers. Maybe for shady private/”international” schools that don’t pay much. All I see on reddit is people not being able to tap into the market of real teaching.
There’s also only 40ish accredited international schools in Japan so I don’t think there’s much demands for licensed foreign teachers.
Which schools are you referring to? I can’t imagine there is a massive need for qualified overseas math and science teachers in Japan, let alone a shortage.
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There is a shortage in general for licensed teachers. Less and less people want to deal with all the unnecessary BS that comes with being a teacher. The long hours, clubs, dealing with parents who expect the HRT will be the kids parent, the needlessly long and convoluted meetings, lack of discipline in the schools, etc…My wife who is a JHS HRT is always busier than needed because they don’t have enough teachers.
As a teacher with numerous certifications and years of experience, $2500/month is just way too low for me. I get emails weekly from schools offering between $2100 and $3000 and it just isn’t worth it considering I make more sitting at home. Why would a licensed teacher travel in a packed train and work 12 hours a day for less than minimum wage?
The low Japanese yen is making offers from even high quality international schools uncompetitive with salaries in other countries.
On the positive side, if you are a long-termer here, now is a good time to attempt to move to a better school in Japan since there is less competition from international candidates. Also great that cost of living hasn’t increased as much as many other nations.