Sarah had always wanted to teach and experience the world, so when she heard of a job in a city where she had a friend already, she jumped at the chance. The interview went great, the school staff seemed nice, and they promised a good pay package, a relatively light teaching schedule, and lots of time off. She took the offer, packed up, and set off to experience the world.

Things went downhill shortly after she landed, though. The housing the school provided was nearly an hour away from the school and, though her teaching hours were light, she found out that she was required to be at the school 8-6pm, even when she didn’t have classes. Factoring in her commute, she had to wake up at 6:30am each day and didn’t get home until after 7pm.

Then the school added a class to her workload; when she initially refused because it was more hours than her contract stipulated, the school threatened to cancel her visa. She felt like she had no choice but to accept the additional classes. Then, she found out that the classes were on Saturday, so she only had one day off a week. Thankfully, the school did increase her wages, but she later realized that her per-hour wage had actually decreased with the changes. What Sarah thought would be a light workload allowing lots of time to travel the country and region turned out to be a grueling schedule that wasn’t worth the pay.

Sarah’s story isn’t unique.¹ I’m not sure what it is about teaching overseas that is ripe for abuse, but I’ve heard more horror stories than I care to recount. After over a decade of education experience in multiple countries and schools, I’m glad to share some advice on how to find your dream teaching job as an expat.

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1. Be clear on your goal

Getting the right job for you starts with knowing what is the right job for you. If you’re unclear on what you want, there’s no way that you’ll be able to find it. Aim at nothing and you’ll hit it every time.

I can’t do anything better than recommend Brian Tracy’s bestselling book Goals to walk you through the process of discovering what it is that you want. I know not everyone is going to read an entire book now, so here are some things I’ve learned from the book and life that I’d encourage you to do.²

Know what you want

Imagine your life 10 years from now and it’s a smashing success in every dimension. What does it look like? Think through your ideal day at school and write it down in excessive detail so that you have a 3D Omnimax Technicolor with Dolby Atmos Surround Sound concept of your ideal.

Here are just a few factors that I would encourage you to consider as you think through your high-definition job goal:

• Where do you live? In what city? In what country? What is the culture like? The environment? How clean is it? How much pollution? How far is it from the school where you teach? Do you walk, drive, bike, take a taxi, ride a subway, have a chauffeur?
• When do you wake up? When do you leave for school? What time do you arrive at school? When do you get home? When do you go to sleep so you can wake up in time for the next day?
• When is your first class? When is your last class? Do you go home in between classes? To an office? To a coffee shop?
• How many days a week do you teach? Are you required to be at the school when you don’t have class?
• How many classes do you teach each day? Each week? What’s your ideal number so that it’s not too many or too few?
• How many class hours do you teach? Can you take on extra classes if you like, or turn away classes if you don’t want them? Are there any days you want to always have off?
• What content do you teach? What style of teaching do you use? Do you use a curriculum? If so, who chose it?
• Who made your lesson plan? What teaching philosophy is it based on? How much freedom do you have to adjust it?
• Who do you teach? What gender(s)? What ages? Where are they from? How many students are in the class? How many times/hours/classes do you teach the same students each week?
• How much do you interact with others teachers? Do you plan collaboratively?
• Do you have other teachers in your classroom or not? If so, what is their role (translator, disciplinarian, co-teacher, etc.)?
• How much do you get paid? Is it a flat salary or does it alternate with number of classes/hours taught? Do you get paid on holidays? If student enrollment increases or decreases, does your pay change?
• How much vacation do you get? Are there restrictions on when you can take it? Any limits on where you can go?³ What about sick days? What holidays do you get off?

Now, you’ll likely never get everything you want in a job—this world isn’t perfect, after all—but knowing what your goal is and having a high-definition picture of it will help you find the best fit for you.

Know what you don’t want

As you answer the above questions and explore other factors that come up as you describe your ideal teaching job, you’ll find that there are factors where what you don’t want is stronger than what you do want. Maybe you don’t have a strong preference about what content you teach (English, art, history are all fine) but you don’t want to teach physics. That’s good to know.

These “don’t wants” are often more clear or more important than what you do want. So, consider the above questions again and ask yourself “What answer would make for the most miserable experience?” and write down your answer. You may surprise yourself with your answers.

Know your priorities

You’ve now generated a detailed picture of your ideal teaching job in what you want and don’t want, but you’ll never get everything you want, so you have to prioritize. Which is more important to you—to get paid a certain amount or to be in a particular city? To teach a certain age of student or to teach a certain number of class hours? To get certain holidays off or to have freedom to choose when to take your vacation time?

The best way to do this is stacked ranking, also known as forced ranking.⁴ I wrote about this fairly extensively in The Global Classroom and so I’ll quote the way I explained it in that article:

What you do is to consider each variable against each other variable and ask “If I could only pick one, which one would I pick?” As you rank each variable against each other, you’ll create a “stack” of the variables ranked in order of their importance to you. The end result is that you can see how you prioritize all the schooling variables, in order of importance.

Definitely check out the free tools in The Global Classroom which you can adapt to use in considering your dream job.

2. Set the right expectations

After you know what your goal is, you’ll want to gauge your expectations about what job you can get and what job a school will want to give you. Those are never exactly the same thing even in your passport country (e.g. schools will always want to give you more class hours and pay you less than you want!), but the difference in expectations is even greater if you’re an expat. If you’re not aware, you can have a quite rude awakening when you try to find a job.

For example, you may think that you qualify for a job because you have a degree from a great institution, have a decade of teaching experience, and are a native English speaker. Then you find out that no one wants to hire you because you were born in a certain country or are a person of color or because you’re a woman or because you’re married (or not!) or because they think you’re ugly or because you follow a certain religion.

The sad reality is that many countries don’t have the discrimination protections that are common in Western countries and sometimes the racism, sexism, ageism, or religious exclusivism is blatant and without apology. Part of this may reflect wrong beliefs on the part of the school, but sometimes the school may have its hands tied by parental/cultural beliefs or even government policies.

In other situations, a school may just want to hire a “token white person” so that they can feature a white “foreign teacher” in their advertising. In a situation like this, they care more that you have a “pretty white face” than if you have the ability to teach. You’d be right to say that such a policy/approach is wrong, but you’re also not going to win that argument.

Sadly, I know people who were fired or refused an interview for the following explicitly-stated reasons:

• The applicant was black. “We don’t have a problem with it, but parents will be concerned.”
• The applicant was from a “non-native English country.” It didn’t matter that the applicant was born to parents who only spoke English, that the applicant was fluent, or that the applicant went to university in the UK, the fact that they were born in South Africa was enough to refuse them a job.
• The applicant followed a particular religion. “If you’re __, then we can’t hire you.”
• The applicant was a woman engaged to be married. Because that meant she could soon have a baby and the school didn’t want to pay maternity leave.
• The applicant was a woman who was dating. Because that means she could get married soon and the same maternity leave would apply.
• The applicant was too old (55). “He won’t have energy to teach our rowdy students.”

So don’t expect that just because you have the right credentials and experience that you can get the job you want. There are a lot of cultural factors at work and so having the right expectations is critical.⁵

3. Protect yourself

I don’t know why, but international teaching jobs are notorious for creating problems for teachers. There’s some shady schools out there, education is often a sensitive industry for many governments, and so foreign teachers are often placed under greater scrutiny than other teachers. Thus, “what works” for a school hiring locals may create massive legal issues for the school and for you when they do the same thing to employ a foreign teacher.

Unfortunately, even if your employer makes a mistake or does something illegal, the consequences can still fall on you, and they can be quite severe. Depending on the labor/visa violation, you could face fines, deportation, visa blacklists so you can’t return to the country, or even jail time. So be sure to be aware of the risks you may face and take appropriate action.

Risks from which you need protection

The exact details of what you need to protect yourself from will differ from country to country, so I can’t provide an exhaustive list to you for any teaching job worldwide. You’ll have to do your due diligence to understand the situation in your specific country and the regulations therein. But here is a list of mistakes that I have seen and they’re the kinds of things you’ll need to make sure your school is handling legally:

Appropriate visa

I had a school offer for me to teach summer classes on and they offered to provide me with a visa. When I inquired which type, they said it was a tourist visa. Nope—at least in my host country, that would be a very fast path towards deportation or a ban. The school had gotten away with it for years, but it was illegal.

Check your host country’s regulations to know what kind of visa a teacher will need. It’s most likely a work visa, at minimum, but some countries also have a special class of visas just for teachers, so don’t make any assumptions.

Visa from the right company

This is not something you would expect, but sometimes a school will provide you a visa that isn’t sponsored by the school itself. Depending on your host country, it may be easier for a commercial business to sponsor a work visa than a school and schools may partner with business to get visas. So you may end up with a work visa, but if it wasn’t sponsored by the school (by their “partner”), you may end up breaking the law.

Visa for the right address

Similar to the above, I had friends who got in trouble because their visas were issued by the main school location, but the school sent them to work at a branch school location. They had a proper work visa and it was for the school, but it was for a branch of the school and so technically their work was illegal. Make sure you know the regulations well enough to ensure that even the appropriate visa issued by the appropriate people is valid for the actual location where you will work.

Paying appropriate taxes

No one likes paying taxes, so there are “creative strategies” to avoid tax in any country of the world. As a foreigner, though, you need to make sure to live in the 100% white area of tax law. Locals maybe can use creative strategies that are grey and often face little to no consequences for doing so. But foreigners often are subjected to greater scrutiny, especially in xenophobic climates, and face more severe penalties for tax evasion, even if it was mistaken.

Here’s a few things I’ve seen:

• Paying you in cash, or partially in cash. The digital money gets reported for tax purposes, but the cash isn’t reported by the school. That’s a great way to get in trouble with the tax office.
• Reporting some salary to former employees. I still can’t believe I saw this, but one school wanted to pay a certain amount to me (and report it) and then report part of my salary as going to a former employee so it would be reported as pay on his passport. Nope, nope, nope. I’ll gladly pay more tax and get the full salary myself.
• Multiple contracts. You sign one contract with the correct salary amount, but then the school asks you to sign another contract with a lower salary that gets reported to the tax office.
• There’s, I’m sure, hundreds of other ways people try to evade taxes.

Communicate to your employer that you want to pay taxes and you don’t want them to do anything unusual to reduce your tax bill. You may pay more in the short term, but it’s worth it in the long run to avoid the risk of breaking the law.

Following other regulations

Because teachers have such a significant influence on children, the education sector is often highly regulated. So make sure you understand the responsibilities that you have as a teacher. Teachers may be required to live in a certain area, to have certain licensures, to complete certain ongoing education requirements, to have certain vaccinations, to have certain medical checkups done, to have certain medical certificates (e.g. CPR), etc.

Make sure to understand the requirements in your host country and to know what your employer is responsible for and what you are responsible for.

Physical dangers

Sadly, classrooms are not always the safest place to be, so make sure to be aware of risks that you may face and take appropriate action. Consider risks such as:

• Foreigners being targeted for kidnappings
• Safety of the area around the school
• Active shooter or terrorist events
• Earthquake, tornado, tsunami risk and policies
• Etc.

Consider using the four-quadrant risk assessment to better assess your risk.

How to protect yourself

In all of the above situations, I’m saying that you need to protect yourself and not blindly trust the school that’s hiring you. However, this is a challenge because, as a foreigner, you may not know the legalities or regulations and might not speak the local language. So how can you identify the risks and protect yourself from them? Here’s a few suggestions:

Ask about policies when interviewing

During the interview, or after they offer you a job, ask about the things I’ve mentioned above. Don’t be challenging, but make sure they have good answers. Write down their answers because you’ll want to “Trust, but verify.”

Ask competitors

After you know what one school will do, ask a competitor school (ideally one that has offered you a job as well) whether those policies/practices are right or not. The competitor school will have every incentive to tell you where the other school is doing something wrong and they’ll tell you. Asking competitors about their competition’s practices is a helpful technique of verifying what one school tells you.

Ask for referrals

Oftentimes, a former foreign teacher will be able to give you a far better real-world assessment of what it’s like to work for a school, so ask for a referral. Just like referrals on your resume, though, a school is probably going to refer you to people who have had good experiences, so take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still a helpful reference point.

The best way, though, isn’t to ask the school for referrals but to ask a job board or a teacher’s group to recommend a school.

Consider schools with a long history of hiring foreigners

Ask a potential school how many foreigners they’ve hired, and for how long. If you’re the first, or they’ve only done it a couple of years, be cautious. Every school has to start somewhere, so don’t run away, but be quite wary. On the other hand, if a school has hired 20 foreign teachers for the last 10 years, they’ve probably learned how to handle all the regulations and you’re more likely to be in good hands.

4. Consider using an agent

The last suggestion I’d have for people who want to teach overseas is to consider using a placement agent. An agent is like a corporate headhunter; they have networks of schools who have needs and they try to find teachers who are a good match for the school. Typically agents are paid by the school once a teacher is hired, so using an agent is unlikely to cost you anything as a teacher while providing you a lot of advantages along the way.

How an agent can help you

There’s good and bad agents out there (more on that later), but a good agent can provide you with a ton of benefits:

• An agent can help protect you. A school working with a person in the middle is less likely to try something shady than they are if they’re working directly with a foreigner. A foreigner may not be aware of what is standard or even legal and so schools may try to scam them, but a local agent who goes between the school and the teacher can provide a lot of protection.
• An agent knows school reputations. A good agent won’t do business with bad or shady schools and only present you with offers from reputable places. As a foreigner, you may not know the reputation of schools, but an agent with local knowledge will.
• An agent can help you evaluate contracts and benefits packages. You may not know the local market in terms of salary, vacation, sick days, maternity leave, etc., but a good agent will help you know what you’re legally entitled to, what is common practice, etc.
• An agent has a wide network of schools. If your options are limited to what you can find online or within your own personal network, you’ll be quite limited in the teaching opportunities you find. However, an agent’s entire purpose is to cultivate networks among dozens if not hundreds of schools, so you’l have far more opportunities through an agent than working by yourself. This is especially helpful if you don’t even know what country or city you want to live in—an agent can be a very helpful starting point.

How to find a good agent

There are good and bad agents out there; I’ve experienced more ads than I care to know offering teaching jobs that read like scams, offer laughably low pay, or suggest jobs that I know are straight-up illegal. Not all agents are good.

Also, be aware that an agent only gets paid by the school if they find you a job, so bad agents may pressure you to accept an offer, even if it’s not really that good. They want to quickly place as many teachers as they can, and a bad agent is only after the “churn” rather than serving both teachers and schools.

So, how do you find a good agent? Here’s two tips I’d recommend to you:

First, ask expats for a recommendation. By far the best way to find a good agent is to ask other teachers or expats if they know an agent they can recommend. Good agents get good reputations; bad agents get bad ones.

Second, consider agent partnerships. You want an agent who is local and thus has local knowledge and networks, but you also want an agent who is an expat who better understands expat needs. So if you find an agency run by a local and an expat partnering together, definitely consider them. Just make sure the expat is actually involved and isn’t just a “foreign face” put on their advertisements.

Conclusion

Teaching is not only a great profession because of the way you can serve future generations, but it’s also a high-demand profession with job opportunities all over the globe. Teaching thus can be an easy way to travel the world and enjoy different cultures. If you want to teach as an expat, make sure to get clear on what your goal is, set right expectations, and protect yourself. A great way to do all of the above is by finding a quality agent who can help place you in the right job.

Sarah’s story would be quite different if she had followed the advice in this article.

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Footnotes

1. Sadly, the story is a composite of true stories of people I personally know, so while “Sarah” is a made-up person, the events described above are real ones. ↩︎
2. But you should read it. Goals by Brian Tracy is one of the most life-changing books I’ve ever read and one of the few that I try to re-read regularly. It’s that helpful. ↩︎
3. Bizarrely, during COVID I wasn’t allowed to leave the county where my school was. So much for traveling! ↩︎
4. I’m not referring to the way of evaluating employees by putting them in a ranked order of quality. That creates a toxic work culture and is unhelpful. ↩︎
5. You may wonder how a school would know the above things. Sometimes they explicitly ask—remember, discrimination protections are different in other countries—while other times they ask for your passport copy or require a picture with your application. ↩︎