Finding a job teaching English on the Web

How do you find a job teaching English? Ensuring that you belong to our post-course support group is your number one priority. A lot of local Barcelona language schools send their openings direct to the teacher training department. Now that's the easiest way to get a TEFL job!

We can't, obviously, guarantee you a job, and you are almost certainly going to have to do some looking yourself, though it is true that for a fortunate minority, jobs do literally fall into their laps.

TEFL jobs around the world are advertised in their hundreds on tefl.com, probably the careers portal for the ELT profession - and that's probably among the first places I would head.

Note that, as on any other decent jobs portal, at tefl.com you can register as a job seeker, cut and paste your CV, and also receive a daily email update of jobs available.

The large language teaching organizations also offer recruitment services on their websites. International House, for example, has a recruitment section on its IH World site, on which it advertises English teaching jobs at the 130 plus IH centres around the world.

Working for a larger organization probably gives you a better guarantee of job security (as well as more likelihood of things like teaching resources, teacher development and so on), so IH World would probably be among the first places I would go, especially if I had done my CELTA course at IH Barcelona (definitely something which would stand me in good stead, at least to make the candidate short list).

Among others, Bell International has a similar online jobs board.

A good CELTA course pass from a well-known training centre is, however, not all it takes to get yourself a job teaching English. Persistence in your search is definitely something likely to be rewarded, for which reason I would recommend the local careers portals , especially if you are particularly interested in staying in Spain.

Servijob and Infojobs are two of Spain's big career portals. Like telf.com they allow you to sign up and receive daily job offerings in your mailbox, though note that you will need a decent level of Spanish to set up your account. Your preferences can be set by province (eg Barcelona) or for the whole of Spain.

Of the two, Infojobs is much better, in my experience. You might need to alter the details you initially enter on their database if you find you start receiving jobs that really don't interest you. Servijob which is also only in Spanish, keeps sending me jobs as van and forklift truck drivers (etc) so I guess I should remove the fact that I've got a driving licence and am willing to travel from their database (!).

One advantage of local portals is that many of the jobs they advertise are part time. True, you want a full-time, preferably very well-paid one, but in fact most people at least when they start out in TEFL find that they need to supplement their income in some way, perhaps with private classes, so 20-30 minutes it will take you to set up an Infojobs account is probably time worth spending.

Note that neither of them can distinguish between an English teacher and any other kind of teacher, so I regularly get ads for things like "profesor de cocteleria", "profesor decoración buffets" (I'm not making this up!) - a problem that you won't get, obviously, on dedicated TEFL portals.

Monster, another internationally well-known careers portal, is hopeless for teaching jobs in Spain, though -- surprise surprise -- they've apparently had no takers for the "indexer (Scandinavian desk)-Finnish" or the "autocoding specialist-Russian" they've been sending me for months.

See also

» Finding a TEFL job in a particular country

» How do I know if a language school offering me a job is a reputable one?