|
||
| Working for Aipusen ETI in Guangzhou for 4 years!! | ||
| Hello, I am a Canadian who has been working for Aipusen for 4 years now my first year I spent teaching with them as a regular ESL teacher and for the last 3 years I have been a manager with them. I thought I could shed some light on some of my experiences working with Aipusen as well as my experiences working with companies in Asia over the past 6 years. One of my reasons for making this post is that I think there are a lot of foreigners now going overseas just for fun and travel and are using teaching simply as a means to make a few bucks for their next big party or trip. As a result the quality of teaching has gone down significantly overseas and particularly in china where getting an ESL job is as easy as buying a bowl of rice. When I first started teaching 6 years ago most of the teachers who I worked with were really enthusiastic about teaching in china and actually enjoyed their jobs. We all worked with the same cutltural differences and barriers that teachers are presented with today, but it seemed back then the teachers I worked with looked forward to those challenges and embraced them as part of the experience. I have found that for the present population of teachers in China this is not the case. Most of the teachers today that are travelling to China are not going necessarily for the challenge but they are going to have fun and looking to make a few bucks for travelling with a minimal amount of effort and hardship. It seems that most foreigners travelling overseas now seem to forget they are going to work in a different culture, where there are different customs and different mannerisms. There seems to be a general negativity surrounding teaching ESL now in Asia, and specifically China, where teachers are looking to get "screwed" by companies before they even actually get there. What this precipitates is that teachers often create problems for themselves and make it very hard to adapt to the different work environment because they are so paranoid about being cheated. The majority of teachers now travelling overseas have pre-conceived notions of problems that are going to arise with the companies they are working for and thus inevitably when they are presented with a challenging or difficult situation in their work (which if you have ever worked for a foreign company before you will know that this is an inevitability) instead of looking to work through the problem they right of the company as a bad company, pull the classic "midnight run" and start the whole cycle over again with a new ESL company just down the road. You'd be surprised if you asked the majority of teachers who seem to be disgruntled about the whole ESL experience in Asia how many companies they have worked for in the years they have been overseas. For the majority, they probably can't count that high. Conversely if you talk to those teachers who love teaching and have been working overseas for many years, chances are they have been with only 1 or 2 companies in this time and more likely than not the companies they work for are the same companies that the disgruntled teachers have had small stints at and left because they felt they were being mistreated. What this all adds up to is that I think the reason why many teachers today are having negative experiences teaching in China is while it is partly to do with the oversaturation of jobs there now and the resulting poor quality in management of some ESL companies, it is equally to do with the poor attitudes and mindsets that the ESL teachers are starting with. This leads directly to my experiences working with Aipusen. Aipusen is a classic example of a big and successful ESL company in China. When I first started working for Aipusen 4 years ago I had an incredible time. The company was fun to teach in, we had a great group of teachers, I believe there was a little more than 20 of us. If I recall we had a very small turnover, something like 3 or 4 teachers for the course of the school year. We had all the problems that all foreign teachers faced working for schools in China: - communication problems with the head office (which consisted of anything from trying to communicate that your toliet was not working properly in your apartment, to the fact that your schools seemed to keep trying to slip extra kids in your class, to the fact that your TA couldn't understand anything you were trying to tell him/her) - problems with understanding the chinese business practises (I won't begin to tell you how frustrating it was at first having to go through 15 people to try and tell someone that I needed a white board for one of my grade 1 classes and then having to explain in detail to every one of them exactly what I meant by "white board". Then there is the classic positive / negative response we always got from our chinese managers, where I would ask for say another TA to work with me that could understand me better and the office manager would smile and postively nod their head to me and say "OK we will try to do this for you" and then invetibaly nothing would be done. The classic last second schedule/TA change was also fun, where I would get a call the night before to tell me that I was now going to be teaching at the other end of the city for no apparent reason or that my TA was being changed who I had worked with all year again for no apparent reason) - problems with living conditions (apartments!!, I remember the first apartment I was put in was great, then 3 months after we started we moved to a different complex, the apartments there were even nicer and we were impressed until 3 days after moving in and the water pipes exploded in my walls flooding our whole apartment. So we moved upstairs to a another apartment that the previous tenants were not so nice too:) After a couple days of vigorous cleaning we got the place under control, but then were dealt with the problem of the shower having the water heater installed right in front of the shower head so you had to contort your body in an s-shaped position around the big block heater in order to take a shower. Then there was the tempermental washing machine that seemed to only work on Tuesdays and Sunday afternoons. There was of course the air-conditioning which the company surprisingly did very well to ensure were always working properly, but for some reason they would always manage to break down on the hottest days of the year) Anyhow although these problems were definitely trying at times when my friends and myself worked in China and at Aipusen we all expected to have crazy stuff like this happen and we didn't really let it bother us. Most of the teachers who worked at Aipusen 4 years ago were also like this, which is why the company ran a little smoother back then. Since my last actually teaching stint with Aipusen I have taken on a a management position with them and I have seen the company grow from 20 teacher to about 40 plus teachers now. The ESL field in China and Asia has coincidedly also taken a huge growth spurt. With that over these last couple of years I have noticed a huge increase in the number of interested foreigners in coming over to Asia to teach. When I started before only those who would apply for foreigner teaching positions were those people who were really serious about teaching, living and challenging themselves in a different culture overseas. Today unfortunately a lot of foreigners are not seeking teaching positions abroad with these ideals, moreso because the idea is interesting and really they have nothing better to do or they simply want to go somewhere to have fun. I noticed this over the last couple of years with the teachers at Aipusen. We have had a few very good teachers come and work with us, but we have had quite a few come in not really prepared for all the difficutlies that I described before. Consequently for these teachers, they did not last very long in Aipusen, most of them broke their contracts within a few months of starting. Looking back at a lot of those teacher that have come and gone quite quickly with Aipusen and other teaching companies I noticed a similarity on all their resumes. The most common was that they had worked for many ESL companies over the last few years and rarely ever completed a contract. A lot of the teachers who left early were very young from the ages of 19-23, many straight out of high school and did a 5 day TESL/TEFL course before deciding to embark overseas. From my personal perspective as well I also noticed many of the teachers who left early also had some other personal issues going on (things such as excessive drinking, drug-use, etc.) Anyhow to sum up what it is like to work for Aipusen today….well I have always had a good experience working for Aipusen. I am presently employed by them as a manager so I realize most people will think I am speaking with a bias here, but I would like to think as a teacher and a foreigner I can speak somewhat impartial on this matter. I will say this, working with Aipusen in guangzhou, you will experience all the problems that you will have with working in any company in China. If you are not ready and willing to work through those challenges then DO NOT go to work for Aipusen…..and I would strongly suggest not working for any ESL company in China or Asia for that matter. Aipusen is also very strict now about having their teachers honour their contracts. The contracts are very straight forward when you start on explaining how the initial deposits (there are 2 intial deposits you pay that come off your first few pay cheques, one is for your apartment security fee which is 500RMB as your apartment is fully furnished, the second is a depoist for your residence permit and your work visa which is 1500RMB) will occur and the airfare/bonus reimbursement is only given if you complete a one-year contract. When you finish the contracts you get your deposits back, plus the airfare bonus. If you do not finish the contract, you will not get the bonus nor will you get the deposits back. Aipusen is really trying to cut-down on the number of teachers who leave early which is why they are trying to get a better foreign management staff and make more incentives on the contract to get teachers to stay the full length of their contracts. This means if you do not plan on honouring your contract or you are the type of teacher who likes to move around a lot between companies DO NOT work for Aipusen, it is not worth it as the biggest monetary bonus when working for Aipusen comes at the end of your contract. So what type of teacher would I recommend for Aipusen, well if you are ready for the challenges of working in a foreign environment and for a foreign company than I would recommend Aipusen as they are very loyal to those teachers who are good workers and enthusiastic about their jobs, they pay well, they are completely legitimate as they offer proper working visa's and temporary residence permits and they also have management positions if you plan on working in the ESL field for a while, so there is opportunity for you to move up in the company. They have an excellent curriculuum which is very structured and easy to teach. They have tonnes of resources available for their teachers and with such a large company there is a good support staff and social environment for the teachers. In summary then, I have found there are challenging aspects of working with Aipusen but no more so than any other company in china or Asia. Aaron Vancouver, Canada the_fuman@hotmail.com |