So things have started to pick up on the job front. The product of thrashing around in the job market looking for some full-time employment for the last year has been a couple of realizations.
I want to continue to teach corporate English. My experiences teaching with OTC have been uniformly positive. Compared to teaching at the elementary school level, and junior/senior high schools, business English students show much more motivation, patience, positive learning behaviors, and their deeper life experiences are easier to leverage into good learning opportunities. I love getting to know the students, and I’ve gotten some really positive feedback that has helped me grow as a teacher.
Actually, conventional wisdom in Japan is that the best jobs for teaching English are in the universities. While this may have been the case at some point in the distant past, it seems to me that it is an outdated idea. In fact, I think that things will get worse in that area soon. There are a lot of private colleges in Japan (formed during the economic bubble of the eighties and nineties), and now these institutions are having more and more problems filling classrooms. As the double crunch of a tough economy combined with the problem of a low birth rate in Japan over the last ten years starts to hit these colleges more and more will go under, making the availability of English teaching positions even smaller. Most teaching positions at universities are limited contracts – so even if you got a job at a university you’d need to look for another one in one or two years. That means job insecurity every few years, which is no fun at all. It is a bad situation for foreign teachers, and one that is not likely to change any time soon.
Businesses, however, don’t face exactly the same challenges (at least for the time being), and international businesses are always looking to improve their English skills in order to be more successful in the world marketplace. This demand will only increase in the future as the world becomes smaller. Although it is still hard too get a permanent position at a business, with the right connections and a lot of patience, it is possible.
My challenge has been to get an “in” at one of these companies. Companies like to hire temporary teachers through an agency like OTC because if the teacher is in any way unsatisfactory they can be gone with a phone call – no mess. In contrast if there is a problem with a teacher that has been hired directly by a company they have to figure it out themselves, and often these teachers don’t have very good Japanese skills, and sometimes these situations can get quite uncomfortable for everyone.
So my strategy has been to get to know the decision-makers at these companies while I am there on a contract basis, and eventually try to figure out a way to get directly hired once they see that I am not the typical foreign teacher. Actually, I had made some serious progress in this with a recent job at Mitsubishi – the coordinator requested me as the teacher specifically, and told the salesman that if they couldn’t get me as the teacher, they wouldn’t hold the class. During this class I’ve gotten to know the coordinator even more, and we’ve worked really well together. I was trying to figure out when the best time might be to float the idea of working there in the future, when something quite unexpected happened.
The other day OTC sent me a message and asked if I would be interested in working full time at Kawasaki Heavy Industries in Kobe. It is a six month contract, and they felt that I was the right guy for the job. After some negotiation and discussions we worked out the details, and so I’m going to start working there September 1. This was a good move for a lot of reasons, but I was a little bummed out that I won’t be available for Mitsubishi in the future.
The pay is solid, I was able to easily get time off in October to host my parents when they come to Japan to visit, and they will work around my schedule at the end of the year when I’m teaching at Kobe University. The six month contract is renewable if they are interested in continuing the course, and the OTC people said they expect it to continue at least another couple of years.
My mission: first, get the contract renewed by working my ass off to make a good impression, and then maybe down the road try to figure out a way to get on staff directly. I don’t know how possible it is (I haven’t even met the folks at this location yet), but it looks like I’ll have plenty of time to make friends and influence people.
Yesterday I wrapped up my last class at Mitsubishi, and the OTC guy there told the coordinator that I wouldn’t be available for more classes in the future because of this new job. She was so disappointed – she looked almost shocked. She said that she was hoping to have me teach more classes in the future, but she understood the attraction of a full time job. If things don’t work out at Kawasaki, I might just knock on her door again down the line.
So, between now and September first when I start full time work again I’ve got a two week gap in my schedule. In the next twenty days I only have the final two classes at Kawasaki in Akashi, a training session in Osaka, and one day of classes for Nozaki sensei. Even when you take out the time in China that leaves about 16 days with nothing in them. Any ideas?
