Just got accepted for a position at ECC and I want to hear people’s experiences – good or bad! I am still deciding if this job is right for me and have not yet formally accepted the offer.
Was it easy to make friends? Were you too busy to travel? Did you find the job stressful or fun? Which city did you live in?
I am F24 and looking to live there for 1-2 years for the experience.
14 comments
In typical reddit fashion I will start by saying I haven’t worked there. A long time drinking friend though has.
He has never had anything particularly bad to say about the company, in fact he prospered in his first few years and is now a permanent employee in the back office.
If you’re outside of Tokyo, making friends or networking will be wholly dependent on your Japanese skills. There will be plenty of people who want to get to know you, and there a huge amount of meetups and language exchanges you can find online.
ECC is probably by far the most ethical (I will be vhallenged on this) of the major Eikaowa chains, I’m sure the other foreigners will gladly hell you out.
I say, go for it.
I like it. We get a decent amount of vacation days, most of which are fixed days off for first-year and second-year teachers. I think new teachers get 5 personal days off. Finding friends is incredibly easy; most people’s first friends are their training group, but I haven’t heard of anyone in my area (Nagoya) or Kansai who was an ass to their coworkers. Although I’m pretty secluded from other teachers because I live outside the actual city, we’re for the most part all connected because we have our own teachers’ LINE group, our communal water cooler, where we bitch and moan and advise each other.
In general, the job is fun; I especially like meeting new adult students. If you feel strongly about wanting to teach only adults, I think you’re gonna have a bad time; one of my coworkers quit after a month because she wanted to teach adults exclusively.
I left less than one year after joining them.
I’m not an English teacher so I reckon the conditions are not the same as there are less demand but my friends who worked there still said they hated it.
Anyway, I live in Kansai, and they would send me ANYWHERE in Kansai for a single lesson, except in the city I live. They once sent me to a place almost two hours away, but “Hey, we’ll give you a ¥1000 bonus for it.” I ended up doing the math, 4h commute for 1 lesson, even with the bonus, didn’t break even with working at a convenience store.
Add to that that they were rude and would regularly make me feel they owned me. I applied to be a regular teacher but they wanted me to work at night for their online “teaching”. I didn’t want to as that would mean no family time at all, but didn’t say so. I used my other job as an excuse, saying it wouldn’t work out. They said OK at first, but would regularly ask again until one day they told me “We seriously don’t care about your other job. We hired you to join the online school so quit your other job now.” That was it for me, I told them to ax me on the spot. They started to apologize but it was too late for me. Never worked for them after that.
Foreigners are usually friendly, but all the Japanese teachers I met thought themselves far more knowledgeable than everybody else, having both my Japanese trainer and another teacher correct me on my native language and culture though they admitted not living there more than a year.
The corporate feel, “we don’t care about students, only about their money.” was also something I couldn’t bear with as a teacher personally.
That’s why I never encourage people around me to have anything to do with ECC, be it as a teacher or even as a student.
worked for a year in fukushima city a few years ago. all in all, at least from what i hear about the other eikaiwa companies, it’s a comparatively decent place to work for what the job is. a few main takeaways:
it’s busy, but it’s not difficult. if you have the energy to keep up with kids and keep them entertained, your lessons are completely planned out in advance and all you have to focus on is time management. in fact, there were two other more senior teachers at the school i worked at and i thought they were amazing, but they often deviated from the lesson plan to make the class more enjoyable for their students and it ended up freaking out the school director and the japanese staff quite frequently.
the housing situation sucks, if it’s still the case that they more or less put you in leopalace. i despised it, and i think a lot of the negative feelings i was having during my time there can at least partially be chalked up to not having a home i could get comfortable in. they also will absolutely not help you find different accommodation.
the structure of the classes is such that even though you’re only seeing your students a couple times a week in relatively short increments, you actually get quite close with them over the course of the year. i’m working as a JET now and am basically with the same 70 kids all day, all week, in a town of maybe 5000 people. even still, i feel like the kids i worked with at ECC i was able to really make a more emotional connection with. i think this has a lot to do with the fact that you’re the only teacher in the room with them, and they have to focus on you. if you’re working as an ALT at a school, you’re often secondary to your JTE, and the kids have a lot of other things going on throughout their day that don’t revolve around you or learning english. honestly getting to know my students at ECC was probably the most rewarding part, and i still think about them from time to time even though that was 4-5 years ago.
finally, i liked a lot of the senior staff at ECC, and was able to actually remain friends with a number of the people working in tokyo (trainers, HR, etc.) even after i left. that might have been about a specific group of people and not necessarily a feature of ECC itself, but they were doing something right in their hiring, at least at that time.
feel free to message me if you have any more specific questions, i’ll try to answer to the best of my recollection!
[ECC was on strike in 2022](https://generalunion.org/tag/ecc/)
I’ve been working there for over 10 years and I really enjoy it. The company has an amazing atmosphere where I work and I really get along with all the staff and Bilingual teachers. I highly recommend it.
I mainly work at a location near my home and I also work part time with their Kindergarten Visiting Program in the mornings to supplement my pay. I would say that most of my work is centered with teaching children and if you don’t mind teaching children, you will do just fine.
Watching my students grow from elementary school students with little English ability to high school students with conversational English ability has been very rewarding for me and I am so proud of what they have accomplished over the years. It’s an amazing feeling.
I live in Tokyo, and have made some really decent friends since I’ve been here.
I do have a family here and prefer to stay home. So, I really don’t hang out with my friends very often. I usually just go to the gym before work or between jobs every day. Hang out with my family And watch movies or TV shows after work. That’s just me though…
Obviously, experiences will vary since each branch is different, and each teacher has their own preferences in terms of the types of classes they like teaching. For example, someone who dislikes children will have a very bad experience; but people who love kids will have a great experience.
One thing that is the same across all eikaiwa is that the company is a corporate monolith that cares nothing at all about the well-being of the teachers. It is out for profit, and is more than happy to throw the comfort of the teachers under the bus to do so (see: shitty housing; shitty work hours; barely any vacation).
But if you can do as you’re told, without complaint, and focus on your life outside work, then two years is probably tolerable. In other words, if you like and enjoy Japan, your job will be secondary and a means to be here.
I will also say this: if you fall in love with Japan and want to stay, then get out of eikaiwa or you’ll be stuck forever in a dead-end, low-paying, shitty job that was never meant to be a real career. It’s akin to someone working at McDonald’s their entire life.
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They have a strong general union presence, which is a good thing for your rights
ECC is really an ESID type company. You could get a really chill school near your home with a great school director and staff. Or you could get a school 2 hours away from you with a terrible school director and bossy staff. Hopefully you luck out. But I’d say its always at least good enough that you can grind out a year before moving on.
It’s the best of the eikaiwa chains in my opinion. But it will all depend on your SD and coworkers.
Everyone at HQ in Osaka is super friendly and helpful. Trainers, Native HR, HR, and even upper management are nice reasonable people.
My medium sized location had a decent SD. They set up the teacher’s schedules at my school so they have plenty of time to plan/prepare. And the overall environment was good.
But you might have a nightmare SD. Eikaiwa managers are first and foremost salespeople. They’re not chosen for their ability to be effective leaders. You might get a bad one, but if you work hard and keep in contact with the trainers/HR they won’t be able to be too mean to you.
Like with all eikaiwa, make sure you plan for your future. You might fall in love with Japan and not want to leave. In that case, be aware that working eikaiwa doesn’t give you any transferable experience. If you can make good money at home, just do that and take extended vacations to japan.
Fhe top two comments gave me huge whiplash
Ecc has been great for me so far. Part-time elementary school and afterschool. Paid holidays included.
The staff at both schools are amazing so I guess it really depends wherever you’re dispatched.
I haven’t worked there, but a buddy of mine has and she said that it was quite an enjoyable experience for her, which for me is pretty good sign.