Want a serious long-term future in ELT? Your credentials with helping students "measure up" can make all the difference, in my opinion...
Image: Darren Hester
As with any job or profession, there are good and bad things about ELT. What is really interesting about ELT, however, is how its ability to both feed and motivate you can vary considerably according to what life stage or situation you happen to be passing through.
When I was in my mid-20s and single, a teaching job with a crappy wage but the chance to experiment and be creative was all good.
When I was (am) in my mid-30s, married with two little children, a teaching job with a crappy wage but the chance to experiment and be creative was (is) untenable.
ELT is one of those sad professions where you will inevitably suffer financially by staying at a level where the real action happens. That is, in the classroom. I look at all the (what appear to be) reasonably well off ELT personalities in their late 40s and early 50s (and beyond), and relatively few of them are active (in any full time way) at the classroom level. It's also astonishing at times to notice how many of them are male/single or female/married.
When it comes to staying out of classroom jobs, I can't blame them one bit. I looked at my earnings after a month of classroom teaching here in Australia and was startled to see that not only was I perilously close to this country's "minimum wage", but I was actually earning less per hour than the casual staff employed at my father's retail bedding shop. The casual staff who had been working for 6 months in their "field" (not 16 years). The casual staff who did not need any university qualifications, post-graduate qualifications, or a Cert IV in Training and Assessment.
Thank goodness a decision to return to classroom teaching had almost nothing to do with earning a wage. Thank goodness I am earning my ELT income elsewhere.
Where?
Coursebooks?
Yeah, there's a bit of money there. Not enough to support a family, of course. I suppose if you did coursebooks full time it might be different.
Where I make my ELT income, and where almost all of my genuinely profitable offers have come from, is in testing.
Tests. Tests. Tests.
TOEFL. IELTS. TOEIC. And all the rest.
A very long time ago now, when I was working in my first job at my first school, the principal waltzed in one afternoon to announce that they were intending to offer test preparation classes for TOEIC and TOEFL, and she needed some "foreign teacher" volunteers to start teaching them.
I put my hand up. I was the only one.
Smartest choice I ever made.
It's not the most enjoyable aspect of ELT to deal with, I'll admit (though it can be more interesting and motivating to work with than some teachers might imagine), but ELT and its obsession with testing keeps me gainfully self-employed, with the real prospect of being able to feed and clothe a family.
Are you a young teacher wondering how you could stay in ELT for the long term?
Personally, I think it's a very good idea to make sure you know and can teach to the major international English tests.
You see, with all those students out there, learning English is a just a step towards a goal. A goal with a gateway with "TEST" written all over it.
It's not the only route to longer-term success and income in ELT, but it sure as hell is probably one of the more reliable ones.
=D
