Interviewed with them at 11pm last night. what are peoples over all experiences with them? success and horror stories?
I have taught for a for-profit adjunct educational facility in Hong Kong before. Really enjoyed (most) of the kids and the work was quite straight forward; how does this compare to Nova’s structure? I know they work with adults as well as children, so that’ll be a change for sure.
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The pay is just above minimum wage, the company management at all levels is completely incompetent, and they’re very exploitative of both staff and customers (they don’t call them students).
You might teach some nice people or have some nice coworkers.
Never worked for them, but one bad thing surely must be the big window walls at mall locations where anyone can walk by and look into the classrooms as you teach. Very ‘zoo’ vibe.
Met some great people. Also met some jackass’s trying to pick up junior high school girls.
Go there and fuck around for a year and have a good time. If you wanna stay longer than that, don’t have their apartment and line up a new job when you can. Most of the shit people say is true, eventually.
I didn’t think it was that bad minus the unlivable wages.
I interviewed with them twice.
First time I bungled up interview questions and still got a job offer, it reeked of desperation so I turned down the offer.
Second time, I did great in the interview and got no job offer. Their loss though as I went on to a very good job in a different industry.
Wages are awful but I had a good experience. They worked me pretty hard but the lessons were pretty easy. Made lots of friends. When I left they charged me a lot of money from my salary because I made the mistake of taking their apartment.
Also they fucked up my documents when I had to get my visa switched, causing a delay in getting my new visa. They complain and are strict about the most random shit and will throw you under the bus in a second in favour of their customers.
I’ve met some really cool and interesting people I like talking to for my adult lessons. I like most of my kids, and they’re really fun classes for me except the Kinder ones. I don’t know anyone that likes teaching Kinder classes.
I’ve only had a few students who I dislike(d) for different reasons, but the vast majority of my time has been fun. It’s definitely rough at first. Throw you into the deep end and let you figure it out. If you’re here for a while, it gets a lot easier.
IMO it’s what you make of it.
I think your experience will vary according to whether you’re a serious teacher, or whether, as someone else put it, you’re just here to fuck around.
For a “here to fuck around” job it’s gonna be fine, since any old job would be fine, wouldn’t it. They pay on time, and as long as you aren’t late and the student like you, there won’t be any issues.
But for someone who is serious about teaching, it would be incredibly frustrating and you wouldn’t make it for a week. As a language school, Nova is a joke.
Never heard a single good thing in my life about Nova.
It varies branch by branch. My friend had an awful time where they placed him; being shouted at by the Japanese staff for their own mistakes, not caring that the last lesson ended after his last bus home, having pay docked for petty reasons, being treated generally like shit. Meanwhile I’ve had it pretty decent; management are (mostly) nice and reasonable people, the Japanese staff I work with have been lovely and are even helping me with learning Japanese.
I will say though that their training is… lackluster at best. 5 days of training, day 1 consisted of a guy on zoom making the 8 of us repeat phrases after him, jumping between different pages in the textbooks back and forth making everyone both bored and confused. The rest was a bit better, but at no point did we see any teaching, neither live or recorded. After that, most of the training is “watch this video and answer this question sheet… You’re now trained!”
The general vibe I get as they’re a visa farm; an easy way into Japan where you can then get a better job once you’re here. Something I’m looking into myself now.
Edit: For the love of God, please do not get an apartment through them. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about doing that.
Worked with them for 6 months. Used it to get into japan and find a better job. I met some really great students there and a couple of them went to the main foreign bar in the “city” that I went to (not hub) and managed to exchange contacts with a couple of them.
My manager was younger than me and power hungry. If she found a way to get me in trouble she thrived on it and complained to head office so they felt she was more competent at her job. I had 0 complaints from students too. And I knew it was her because we were the only two in that branch (it was a new branch and in the Inaka so not many students). If you take the job, just keep an eye out and don’t trust management. Try and keep it as professional as you can.
I have been at Nova for a while now… You’ll meet some kind and friendly students. Some of the staff will be very helpful and welcoming but some of them will help very little and not engage you at all. Management is disorganized and will only speak to you when they need a favor… or to complain about something small you did in a lesson. Some managers have been very nice and helpful but most are just shady and untrustworthy.
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My advice is… do it for a while but don’t get stuck for too long. Don’t go into it worrying about making friends at work or getting respect from the company. Just try do the job… try to make it fun for the students. and more importantly make sure you’re having a good time outside of work.. hobbies.. sightseeing… etc.
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Good luck with your decision
I had an interview with them online about a week ago and was rejected. I’m currently teaching in Thailand. I’m in my 40’s, and have 10 years experience teaching (8 years in Japan). Do you think I was rejected because I’m old, over qualified, or maybe I just did a bad interview?
If you really want to live in Japan, there’s nothing wrong with working for them for a bit then jumping ship when you find another job. I worked at NOVA for 1 month, got hired as an ALT then quit. Immigration didn’t care, NOVA didn’t care, new company doesn’t care. I would have to rate my experience with NOVA as 2/10 If I were to be honest. Management was the biggest problem for me.
The actual job itself is fine, students are usually great and the lessons are all done by the book so almost zero prep time. A co-worker of mine basically described the job as host work in English but without the alcohol or the money, and thats a pretty accurate description. Not sure if they have the same options but avoid the independent contractor agreement at all costs and make sure to sign as a nova employee. Half of the stuff in the IC contract is probably illegal. My only main complaints from my time there were the unsociable working hours, shit pay with no proper bonuses or salary increases and the Japanese management
I would avoid. I’ve lived in Japan for almost 20 years and around when I first got here there was a big scandal with nova. Basically there was a lawsuit that nova lost over charging students for their full contracted lessons even if they quit and nova was ordered to pay a large sum of money back to those students. The owner of nova ended up not paying employees, closing schools without notifying employees etc….. then he leaves out of Japan until he was located in Saipan or something like that. Maybe he got extradited??? I don’t remember. I think many of nova foreign teachers ended just never getting their back pay. There were news articles about nova teachers teaching their students in the park in exchange for food etc….. it was a huge mess! I know that they are run by a new company but honestly I feel like if they ever got in a money problem again the foreign teachers would be shit out of luck again so I would only work there as a last resort and then start job hunting immediately after arriving in Japan and if already in japan to just avoid them all together.
one thing to know about eikaiwas:
they are extremely discriminatory against foreign staff in terms of incentives and career plan. they are non existant. they have you sell and aquire new clients(students) with no incentives, only for it to go to the manager and japanese head teachers. you may be there for more than 5-10 years, but never gets promoted nor able to become seishain. they give you 5 paid days off total every year where other non-eikaiwa companies give you almost 20 days private and 20 days sick leave. the positive is they give you a paid ride to the country and a visa. the best is to stab them in the back and just receive the visa card then never show up again, only to find a better job. you get a 2000 dollar free ride and valid visa. they expend us, we slap them back
They come across to me like the McDonalds of the English teaching world. A business who’s primary differentiator is treating the teachers like a pure cost center, and doing everything they can to shave costs.
They’ve been around so long, and racked up so many bad stories, I think they’ve just given up and accepted that they’re badies.
E.g. I saw them advertising jobs online, but with independent contractor classification. There’s no chance in hell a grunt English teacher working for an English school is an “independent contractor”, but when shaving costs is everything, I guess in their thinking, breaking the law is worth it.
For the customers, they get some form of “I had an English lesson today”, at a low price, at a convenient location. Pure commoditization.
To me NOVA = dodgy English conversation school that went bankrupt due to dodgy practices. Hard to believe they use the same name after that shitfest.
I was the for a few months back in the good old Saruhashi days. Thoughts…
– Best experience was getting a visa, being met at the airport (then taken to my group apartment), going on loads of mad piss-ups in central Tokyo (with crazy gaijins who were at Nova for the fun) and working at a branch in a MASSIVE shopping centre. As a job straight outta uni it was pretty awesome working in central Tokyo, catching the subway and getting lost in such a grandiose city. I was buzzing the whole time on a diet of beers, coffee and vitamin water. Short-term… BEST experience ever! Avoid the politics and bitter people who’ve been there too long. Easy job and it got me to a country I’d always wanted to live in.
– Worst… WORST experience? TBH I didn’t have any. I was just partying the whole time and living the dream. The most confronting was when I took-on a heap of extra shifts in Koiwa after a teacher had been murdered. I never met her but like… I saw the murderer’s student file and met people who’d know her. Didn’t realise that was why I was offered so many extra shifts but it was a tight community at that branch and I met an awesome friend outta it. Some would call it freaky but I met good people outta it and bagged some good coin (seriously good coin for the industry TBH). No complaints from me.
Horribly exploitative contracts. But generally good (non-management) staff and students. A few weirdos, but they’re mostly fine. I had some really good lessons with older students who were already fluent and just wanted to chat. Their kids lessons absolutely suck though. I work 100% with kids now and every single curriculum I’ve used since then has been far better than what Nova have.
@ those who are saying to not stay in the company too long and find a new company to work for; what companies did you work for/ companies you recommend?