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Dave’s ESL Cafe
Dave’s ESL Cafe is a unique website in that it was a pioneer in providing a platform for both schools and teachers to find employees and jobs.
Dave Sperling qualified in 1995 as a linguist and started his website as a place where ex-pat ESL teachers, students and educators could communicate. It grew as a place for jobs and where schools could advertise vacancies and job seekers post resumes. At the time of my research, Dave’s had 140 international posts and 61 posts in China for teachers, but his site is particularly active on the Korean job board where he had 254 vacancies. Sadly, this is way down from pre-Covid years when the site often had several thousand vacancies.
Teachaway.com
Teach Away started in 2003 as an international teacher recruitment startup and in twenty years has placed 710,000 teachers globally. In early November 2022, the site advertised 4,491 vacancies for teachers globally, with Japan, the USA, China and the UAE being the most popular destinations. Its dedicated ESL job board had 1,620 available jobs and 3,196 online jobs.
Tefl.com
Having started in 1997, TEFL.com is one of the oldest established job platforms for English language teaching with 28,893 registered recruiters, it had 178 job advertisements for a total of 2,211 positions in 42 countries in early November 2022 and 187 Summer vacation jobs available.
OETjobs.com
OETjobs.com – the OET standing for Overseas English Teaching jobs – is a good place for new, prospective ESL teachers to start their job search. It provides a dedicated resume example, templates and guidance on all aspects of getting recruited. The platform has a comprehensive list of online teaching companies and carries an unknown number of vacancies from many countries, but especially popular destinations such as Korea, Japan and China.
Indeed.com
Indeed.com is said to be the foremost job website in the world, with 14,600 employees and over 300 million visits per month. So, Indeed.com is not a dedicated education platform, but it has many localized job vacancies. For example, if I’m located in South Africa and type “teacher vacancies” it immediately showed 106 jobs advertised in the past week, including that of recruiters looking for math, science, business English, computer, and PE teachers to work in the UAE.
Under “ESL Teacher” it showed 5,991 online jobs all over the world.
Teacherhorizons.com
Teacher Horizons is a dedicated teacher job site founded in 2011 by a team of teachers and international school principals and teachers who have partnerships with international schools all over the world. In November 2022, it advertised 1,361 vacancies in over fifty countries.
Seekteachers.com
SeekTeachers is a premium international teacher recruitment consultancy working with nurseries through to universities we specialize in placements for qualified staff right through to middle and senior leadership including support staff.
In November 2022 the site advertised 878 high-paying education jobs (9 executive positions) in the following countries: United Arab Emirates (241), China (233), Qatar (119), Saudi Arabia (88), Oman (75), Uzbekistan (52), Kuwait (32), and Djibouti (12). Teaching jobs range from KG/ Foundation (83 jobs) to Middle School (497) and High School (513).
ESLemployment.com
ESLemployment.com is a fairly new platform focused exclusively on the ESL/ EFL field and its growing English language employment needs. In early November 2022, the site had a total of 9,509 advertised vacancies all over the world, including online jobs.
Finding a teaching job abroad may seem easy, but it is often a difficult and time-consuming process. Using the best and trusted websites will help a lot in finding the best job and to avoid a lot of pitfalls to avoid.
In general, the big demand is for English Second Language (ESL) teachers, but most of the websites we are discussing cover all kinds of teaching jobs abroad.
Teachers looking for vacancies in the United Kingdom, for example, can find formal employment via official websites which are very effective. I’ve made a separate article/ video about finding jobs in the United States. Just follow the link.
So, the focus of this article/ video is on finding teaching jobs abroad, primarily for teaching English as a Second Language.
Tes.com (UK & global)
Tes.com in the United Kingdom, is a giant in education support that started out more than a hundred years ago as a supplement (a separate section) in The Times newspaper. Today, Tes Global employs 600 people in ten offices worldwide to support 25,000 schools in over 100 countries.
At the time of writing, Tes.com had 2,699 international vacancies in teaching, lecturing and education (management, etc.). It had 6,219 jobs available in the UK and 1,040 in Australia.
Job seekers can fine-tune their search for primary or secondary schools, according to location or position. Tes.com also offers a wealth of over 900,000 teacher-made resources for teachers. It also provides, for example, career advice and tutorials for new teachers, including those who need to pass the dreaded NQT (National Qualification Test).
EducationAmerica.net
EducationAmerica.net has 2.8 million users, 8,272 registered employers (schools) and at the time of writing carried 15,800 teaching vacancies in the USA. After free registration, job seekers can upload their resumes, cover letters, transcripts, certification and other documentation. They can apply online and get information about vacancies emailed to them.
Ten other dedicated education websites and more information to find jobs in the USA are discussed in the following article: https://etateach.com/best-us-websites-to-find-teaching-jobs.html.
Final advice – Read the Requirements
Jobseekers must familiarize themselves with the basic requirements in advertisements. The best paying companies – abroad and online – often ONLY employ native English-speaking persons from the USA, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Some go as far as to only employ teachers from North America to avoid accents that are peculiar and confusing to foreigners.
So, let’s dive into ten of the best websites for finding jobs abroad, especially in ESL. I do this randomly and do not imply that the first mentioned is better than the tenth.
