By Arnold Vis
When you sign up for one of our programs and pay the program fee, we turn our attention to finding a school for you in your chosen country.
In this blog post, I’ll explain how that process works, and how we take your preferences into account.
Being accepted onto the program, and what it means
When you apply for our program, we have an extended video call (30-40 minutes) about how it all works, and what to expect from working with us. Here’s a recent blog post with tips for that call.
If you get an offer from us after the call, it means two things: (1) that we think you’re a suitable candidate for the program you’ve chosen, and that we think you’ll do a good job, and (2) that we’ll be able to find you a school.
No guarantees on being placed in a specific location, but we’ll do our very best
We appreciate everyone that chooses our program and commits to working with us. As such, we want you to be happy with your placement, and we’ll do all we can to accommodate your preferences. However, we don’t guarantee meeting them, as it’s not our decision.
When you join the program, we’ll ask you for a top 3/ top 5 of cities you’d like to work in, and what age group you’d like to work with.
We also ask you for a brief introduction video (just 1-1.5 minutes long) to share with schools, along with your CV.
We will always introduce you to partners in your preferred location and with your preferred age group first, but success is not guaranteed.
Examples
As an example, on our China program Shanghai is a popular destination. At the moment, our main partner in Shanghai offers work at kindergartens, and these schools strongly prefer younger candidates who are recent graduates.
So for candidates who are in their 40s, we would try for Shanghai if that’s their preference, but chances are we will struggle to secure a placement there.
We would work down the list of your other options until we succeed, and stay in close touch with you throughout the process.
Another similar example is our current partnership with a school in Chumphon, Thailand. This school looks to hire female candidates as the parents of the school are more comfortable with female teachers. So for this school we are unlikely to succeed for male candidates.
Refund policy regarding preferred locations
When I went to teach in China, I was keen to work in Shanghai and applied to lots of schools there, but I wasn’t successful. In the end I got a job in Wuhan, and loved my time there. If anything, in time I felt pleased that I ended up in Wuhan.
This experience has informed my personal view that while location of course matters, by far the most important thing is the experience of a new country and culture, and meeting lots of new people. It made me conclude that it can be amazing anywhere, and that how it works out mostly depends on your own attitude.
As outlined above, we are dependent on the hiring decisions by our partner schools, and it means we generally need leeway and flexibility to arrange placements.
Because of this, we stipulate in our terms and conditions that we don’t guarantee that you are placed in a specific location, and you must be open to any of the placements on offer.
However, we also recognise that sometimes this may make no sense to you as a candidate. For example, I sometimes speak to candidates who are moving to Poland because their partner lives and works in Warsaw. I totally get that in that case, this candidate may exclusively be open to jobs in Warsaw.
The key thing is to tell us this in the initial call, so we can keep it in mind, and we can assess on the initial call how likely it is we can place you in Warsaw. If chances are very good, we will then add a specific note to your acceptance email to specify that you’d get a full refund of the program fee in case you are not placed in Warsaw.
So to sum up, everyone that chooses this program means a lot to us, and we’ll do whatever we can to get you your dream location. But there are limits to what we can do, due to the fact that hiring decisions are made by our partner schools rather than by us.
I hope this blog post has helped clarify the process and how it works, and we encourage you to discuss any placement preferences with us in the initial call, so we can make sure we’re on the same page.
Ready to get the journey started? You can apply here.
If you have any questions, please don’ t hesitate to email me: arnold@impact-teaching.com
