Language School Question and Answer Section
A service of The Teaching in Japan Page
The Editors of the Teaching in Japan Page have often noted that around seventy percent of the questions posted in various web discussion forums concerning teaching in Japan are questions about working conditions at the "Big Three" language schools: NOVA, AEON, and GEOS (Berlitz is sometimes included as number four). We believe that this is most likely because aside from the JET Program, more teachers come to Japan to teach in these companies than with all of the other organizations combined. Thus, we, as Editors of an increasingly popular site for Japan-related teaching information, decided to write to these companies to try to get answers to the most commonly asked questions in order to post them here so that those thinking about coming to Japan could compare the employment packages of each company in a non-biased forum.
The Plan
We sent email to the recruiting divisions of AEON, GEOS, NOVA, and BERLITZ with the hope of getting prompt responses in order to create this page, and we have now posted replies from the three companies who responded.
Linked below, you can read both our questions and the answers from the personnel divisions of three of the four big players in English Language teaching in Japan. We will promptly post responses from AEON if we receive them. We believe that those who are thinking about teaching in Japan will find it useful to be able to compare both working conditions and the compensation offered by these major companies. We used the same format for all of the responses so that you can easily print them, and then read the answers carefully in order to compare them before making an employment decision. Good Luck!
We hope that this information is helpful to you, and we welcome comments to our webmaster at Question and Answer Page Comments
Results of The Teaching in Japan Page Survey of Language Schools in Japan
- Prior to reading the answers, check out the text of the letter which we sent to the language schools. Our letter may be found HERE.
- Questions and Responses from the Tokyo-based personnel department at BERLITZ
- Questions and Responses from the Canada-based personnel department at GEOS
- Questions and Responses from the Tokyo-based personnel department at Nova
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