Re: EF English First Hangzhou

Hi Addie,

My name is Jake, I work at Suzhou Foreign Language School in Suzhou. I worked at EF in Shanghai for a year and a half before that, so I'm commenting on that basis. I would not recommend that you work at EF, for a few reasons. Sorry it's so long but I hope it's helpful.

First off, understand that EF is a huge company and that's the problem. It's hard for the company to keep tabs on all its training centers, teachers, and DoSes and make sure everything is going as it should. My experience was that I had a string of bad DoSes (supervisors) that really took the fun out of working at the school. They were always micromanaging the teachers (riding us to keep us "in line" as if that was necessary) at my center and using scare tactics to keep us working hard. But it didn't make us work harded, just demoralized us.

Second of all, EF has very high turnover both with its teachers and with its administration. So the teachers are generally treated with a certain amount of distrust. And the administrators come and go quickly too so they're usually not trained well at all. In my year and a half at Wujiaochang EF I had 3 Directors of Studies (supervisors), 4 center managers, and it was very clear to all the teachers that the DoS's job was to police the teachers, not to help the teachers in any way, as their job title would suggest. It always felt to me like the real bosses of EF were on vacation and they'd hired temps to come in and run the company in their absence. Just seemed like nobody ever knew quite what was going on, and different bosses would tell you different things. My center in Wujiaochang once didn't get to go to a company event because our center manager forgot to schedule it! So we were stuck working and she nearly got fired for it (ended up getting fired for general laziness 2 months later).

The last thing about EF that bothered me was the curriculum, which consisted of PowerPoint slide shows that all the teachers teach from. They're hastily thrown together and not thoroughly proofread/edited before posted on the server to be taught. Another case of EF's poor quality control. Sometimes the lessons were great -- Andrew Reilly was a rockstar and writing good lessons -- but on the flip-side, some other writers churned out lesson after lesson that I was utterly embarrassed to have to teach. And EF would say, "the lessons are just a starting point, you're free to modify them or add your own material in any way you want." And that's true, but when they make you teach 5 classes a day, you don't have a lot of time or energy to be fixing all these lessons for them. And after awhile you lose the desire to be cleaning up after them when you can tell they're doing a shoddy job to begin with with the lessons.

Now I work at Suzhou Foreign Language School, a private K-12 school in Suzhou, and it runs pretty much like a well-oiled machine, I love it. At the end of the day, EF is just a retail business, like a gym, or a GAP, or a shoe store. It is definitely a for-profit company, with the emphasis on profit, and advertising, and you feel it when you work there.

*EF students can be a LOT of fun, it's just the management that takes the fun out of working there.

So you can try it for awhile if you want, but I would say don't bother, you can do better. You'll be glad you did.