Wow, I just saw this after being away for a while.

A little background first of all:
Before coming to China I taught computing at a public school in England for four years
I'd been to China three times, with this being my third time
This was my first ESL job at any school, and I worked at Shane for three years

I have to agree that there are better places than Shane in Dongying East City. Whilst I discourage anyone from working from there as they are a horrible 'institution', they are perfect for those with no qualifications or ability to teach. They readily welcome (and at the moment actively employ) those whose grasp of English is at best described as 'functional'. One 'teacher' whose lesson plan I observed had even managed to incorrectly spell the personal pronoun "I", using a lowercase instead. Incase you think this might be weeded out quickly, he admitted to the head teacher that his English was terrible. I survived (or perhapds even 'thrived' over) three years there, with reasonable pay and good conditions, although I had many fights with management during this time to ensure this was achieved.

Regardless of anything I've said before, one of the worst things I've seen is that Shane will happily and do regularly 'recruit' new teachers when they're either not needed or not better than others. This means that a new teacher, as a potential 'employee' of Shane, may leave their country (at great expense) and arrive in Dongying expecting a job, only to find that the job has mysteriously disappeared and that they now have nothing waiting for them. In my three years here I think I saw 20 or so people that this has happened to, including a teacher whose big crime was having a nose ring and having such was never seen again. I remember another teacher called Grant who I heard ended up begging in Shangai.

Basically, a 'contract' from Shane is at best a suggestion of a contract. As Mohammed has shown, it doesn't matter if they've given you a Z visa or anything else, if they don't like you personally (wrong colour, sex, age, weight) they won't recruit you. You can try to ensure through conversations on Skype and emails that it will lead to a job, and I strongly suggest you do, but when you're in country this will unfortunately count for little. They'll happily lie, along the lines of "well I don't know why x told you that because that's just wrong", and you have no recourse to speak to 'x'.

That said, Shane is great if you have no qualifications and really want to be in China as they will lie to the PSB about these to ensure your visa; they did for me and many other teachers. That said, I've recently found that their 'efforts' before cause problems after, as they won't release their false paperwork to any subsequent employer. So it's kind of a one-shot thing.

As I said before, to put the facts clear:
- four years teaching in England before...
- three years in China working for...
- three years with Shane, and the outcome is I...
- wouldn't recommend it, as they'll take advantage and screw you over as best they can

Turnoi et al: before your inevitable comments I'm sure that all readers of this website are aware that your views on anyone working for Shane or many other 'language mills' are quite well known to regular and casual readers of this website. For this reason, I think it will have more effect if your comments refrain from saying that "you're all deechers" and "if you work for shit schools you must be shit deechers", and instead suggest something that might actually make a difference.