JISHOU, HUNAN — If you have not caught on by now, there is a huge demand for native English-speaking teachers worldwide. That demand is especially acute here in China.
Here’s why. Every student has to take English while in middle and high school. College students have to pass an English competency test in order to earn a four-year degree and/or obtain a decent white-collar job.
Yikes! That’s a lot of students, and consequently there’s an enormous demand for English teachers. You have no idea.
To teach here as a “foreign expert,” you only need to show you have a bachelor’s or higher degree and a willingness to teach. There are hundreds of these jobs advertised every day on hundreds of websites.
I signed up with one website several months ago, www.seriousteachers.org. At the time, I was in the States and I got no offers. Once I changed my location to China and my availability to “immediate,” I started getting at least four job offers a day!
Of course, I turned them all down, since I am under contract here. And I had to pull out of the email notification service, or I’d be spending all my time saying, “not now, thanks,” to all these desperate employers.
It’s not just the government schools and universities that need English teachers. The English language graduation requirement has spawned an entire industry here of private English academies and tutors, catering to middle- and upper-class parents who believe the investment will ensure their children decent jobs in the future.
