Location
Unsurprisingly not many teachers want to live in rural Vietnam (which I did for 3 months). The company forces most new teachers (a random allocation process) to move to smaller cities/towns in Vietnam, which will be told to you once you have completed a week of unpaid training and have paid for document checks, police checks etc. You have little choice in regards to your placement. Everyone wants to be placed in Hanoi or HCMC and few get it. Once placed, moving centres is a long and arduous process, full of delays (after making my request I was told I would change centres in 2 weeks, this turned into a 2 month process). The Vietnamese staff have pay deducted if a teacher leaves their centre, so they do all they can to prevent it happening.
Schedule
Most teachers have to work most of their hours on the weekend, in the mornings (typical for Vietnam in all fairness). Headteachers have the best schedule (mine didn’t work mornings at all) and make it fit around their needs and their friend’s needs.
Payment
In HCMC they recently forced all teachers to sign new contracts pushing their hours up from 18 hours a week to 30 hours a week, but the 12 extra hours are unpaid. Payment is often late. They open a bank account for you with an awful bank (you have no choice in this.) Promised raises aren’t given. Paid sick days promised to me in my contract weren’t honoured (as being sick on the weekend is inexcusable in management’s eyes)
Teacher Welfare
My biggest gripe with them really. Teachers are disposable to them. Little is done to resolve teachers issues. For me personally my passport information (DOB, passport number etc) was shared with every employee at the company (they don’t understand what data protection is). The company housing I had to move into was dirty, unfurnished and the A/C was broken (in 40 degree heat). New teachers have to write reports for kids they’ve never met. In the interview process I was told every employee receives and pays for medical coverage – my pay was deducted monthly but I didn’t have medical coverage for most of my time in Vietnam, due to errors on behalf of the HR team.
Material
Embarrassingly shoddy material you have to teach, written by non-natives in Korea (Phrase of the day example from my memory “How did you break a broken leg?”). The kids hate it and you have to teach it. It’s not only incorrect English you teach, but the topics are excruciatingly boring and out of touch. E.g. 4 Saturday nights (from 7.15-9pm) in a row I had to teach fifteen 12-15 year olds about fire safety. All in all we covered fire safety for about 6 hours. The kids resent you for how boring the material is. The topics change but the exercises are exactly the same, in the same order (read a story, comprehension questions, put the words in order etc). The lessons don’t teach grammar, so it’s not challenging in the slightest. All you do is press the smartboard for answers. It is mind numbingly monotonous.
If you’ve read this far, I’m sure you can tell I didn’t have a good time with this company. I understand Vietnam is the developing world etc, but I was given this excuse over and over again for the lack of professionalism.
To finish I’ll tell of a story that happened to my housemate. He came to Vietnam, applied to APAX, had his documents sent from the other side of the planet, did a visa run, completed a week of unpaid training, to be told at the end that they couldn’t arrange a visa for people from his country. All in all it cost him about $700 (postage, visa run, living expenses etc).
