Professional Teaching Careers in ELT
A TEFL Certification is your entry key to English teaching, but what are your lifelong prospects in this dynamic industry?
Teaching
It all starts here with your TEFL certification. Teaching is the essential foundational skill you'll need for many professional positions in the English Language Teaching (ELT) industry.
As a teacher, you will deliver high quality face-to-face English language courses to adults and young learners at schools and language centers. Some begin working at higher level institutions like a university or teaching business English to corporate clients
The experience you'll get in the classroom facing real non-English speaking students, will build your foundational skill set that you can draw upon whether you eventually pursue a more business role or academic related position within the ELT industry.
What follows is a brief look at some of the professional paths in a rewarding professional ELT career your teaching background could bring you to.
Director of Studies
Sometimes called Head Teachers, these are senior instructors who now spend less actual time in the classroom and more hours managing teachers and the curriculum they teach. They're typically responsible for teacher performance and development.
Teaching Management
A language school operates as the businesses in the competitive ELT education sector environment. As a "manager" your work will revolve around day to day operational management, dealing with customers, competition, marketing, pricing, cash-flow and a hundred other things. Your role may also include some more strategic management responsibilities such as negotiating with partners or suppliers and evaluating teacher-utilization data.
Teaching Training & Monitoring
Another professional teaching career option would be working with teacher candidate trainees at TEFL training programs or at universities to train the next generation of qualified teachers.
This position often also includes the monitoring and mentoring of qualified teachers to further develop their English language proficiency and/or teaching knowledge and skills
Product & Curriculum Development
If you have a flair for creating digital and broadcast materials, this may be an area for you.
ELT is evolving fast and the industry is looking for new ways of delivering English tuition. Increasingly, there is a high demand for materials through digital platforms so students can learn whenever and wherever they choose...and so teachers can continuously assess them and monitor their performance.
In the business English segment, this could mean creating short
skill-specific courses like writing emails, making effective presentations and power negotiating for corporate clients.
As an EFL teacher you will already have skills and experience in using other peoples’ materials and in designing your own. If you’re an English language teacher trainer you will have experience in designing and delivering training materials to teachers face-to-face and perhaps online.
Training Advisors
This is an advanced professional teaching career option where you are a project managers that are involved with partner institution (and even countries) to deliver ELT related projects, And while these jobs need a whole range of skills which aren’t required for many ELT jobs, an ELT background is essential.
These management skills could include; designing and bidding for the project itself, building in a system for evaluation, recruiting and managing a team and ensuring that the project has a sustainable future after you have left.
Qualifications Beyond TEFL
For another perspective on where your TEFL certification and teaching experience can take you, Vantage recommends:
A Career in ESL: Options & Qualifications Beyond the TEFL Certification published by GoOverseas,
Future ESL Trends
"Technology won't replace teachers. But teachers who
use technology will replace those who don't."
It's an "e" and 'i" World
eLearning has already been established since around the turn of the century and mLearning (mobile) traces its birth to the introduction of smartphones in 2007.
A learning management system (LMS) usually provides the administrative base for teachers in delivering electronic courses. This is a software application for the documentation, tracking, reporting and delivery of electronic educational courses or training programs.
Today's most innovative schools are increasingly putting part or their entire course online and then teaching them through "blended" learning environment.. Information technology is bringing a lot of change to traditional classrooms and Vantage will be introducing these technologies in its TELF Certification course. We will show you how you can use technology to make an impact in the teaching profession.
Is Social Media a Fad?
Arguably one of the biggest trends in the first decades of 21st century is the advent of Social Media (SM). Smartphones aren't just mobile phones; they are computers and they're already the way most people go online. SM is transforming almost every business and its already having a huge impact within the ELT world
Eric Qualman coined the term "socialnomics" to address the impact of Social Media on business and industry. His video explains all this best.
As you watch, remember that it was made in 2016—a long time ago in SM terms. These statistics are now dated.
Word of mouth has always been important. Today - with the advent of social media - we've gone from just talking to our friends in our neighborhood to a global "World of Mouth" village.
Today we can talk to almost everyone everywhere like never before. So is all this a fad? Or the future?
We are certainly living in the Digital Age and with this comes many challenges and many opportunities. New positions that are transforming every industry and none more so than the ELT world where the most successful language providers are increasingly needing to listen to their markets and to their students,
More jobs are being introduced and, in many cases, jobs that were unheard of a decade ago.
Here are ten new jobs we didn’t have ten years ago.
As you read this, you may want to think of the skills involved in a particular position and how that can be incorporated into what you're doing...or want to do. Some of tomorrow's career don't exist today.
Social Media Management
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