Getting beginners started speaking English is difficult; techniques include translation, mime, pictures, and a lot of repetition. With young learners, you may be able to make a game of it. Patience and a sense of humour are essential; attempts to communicate when language skills are very limited are hard on both student and teacher.

With intermediate students, you get seemingly straightforward questions that strain your knowledge of your own language when you try to answer. If "He doesn't have much money" is OK, what is wrong with "He has much money"? Which is better: "a big red balloon" or "a red big balloon"? Why? Is the other incorrect or just unusual? Training and grammar reference books can help a lot here, though sometimes the answer is just "That is the way we say it."

From advanced students, you get even more difficult questions on grammar and usage. Also, especially in ESP settings, you may need considerable knowledge beyond the language itself. For example, to teach business English above a certain level, you must know quite a bit about business. You need not be as expert as the students, though. For example, to teach medical English, you need not be a doctor but a nurse might make a fine teacher, a degree in biology or experience in a related field would help, and at least a good understanding of high-school-level biology is probably essential.

For most classes, considerable planning and preparation is needed to produce reasonable quality lessons. A language teacher's workload is generally 15 to 20 contact hours a week; with preparation time, marking, staff meetings and so on, that is a full time job. Generally, there are some extra-curricular activities as well.

There are exceptions. With small advanced classes, sometimes all you need to do is start a discussion. Preparation consists mainly of choosing a topic; students just grab it and run. Or for some classes, you may be given a carefully laid out program with a textbook, student workbook and sometimes even presentation slides provided; such courses require less preparation. On the other hand, some schools will just dump you in the deep end ("Here's your class; teach it!") with no materials, and sometimes with other problems like no photocopier or Internet, or a class where students have wildly different levels of English. In those cases, you put in quite a bit of extra time.

There can of course be problems with this. It is fairly common for employers to want up to 25 classroom hours a week, and 30 is not unheard of. Management and teachers fairly often disagree on the importance of various meetings and paperwork. Some schools push the extracurricular stuff too far, requiring a lot of (usually unpaid) additional duties. Some rent their teachers out to local schools, which often means you have quite a lot of (usually unpaid) travel time. At some schools, nearly all classes are on evenings and weekends, or "split shift" schedules (where you teach say 9-11AM in the morning then 7-9PM at night) are fairly common. The worst schools may have several of these problems together; they tend to burn out teachers, to be unable to keep staff, and to be continually advertising jobs. Beware of such schools!

On the other hand, some teachers assume that showing up for class is all they have to do, wandering in with no preparation and inventing a lesson plan as they cross the threshold of the classroom. Expert teachers may be able to pull this off occasionally, but making a habit of it or trying it without a lot of experience generally leads to disaster. Teaching ESL is not just part of your holiday; it is a demanding job and needs to be taken seriously.

There is some risk in taking any overseas job.

If you travel somewhere and then look for work, you avoid some of the risks but you incur expenses. Also you may miss out on benefits; free housing and annual airfare home are more-or-less standard when hiring from overseas, but less common for local hires. Finally, you will likely not be able to get a working visa in advance since you don't have a job. Depending on local regulations, this may be a minor detail or a major hassle.

On the other hand, if you are recruited from half a world away, it is hard to know exactly what you are getting into or who you are dealing with. Most teachers end up just fine in their overseas jobs, but problems are common enough that being careful is absolutely necessary.

Some schools are greedy businesses exploiting both teachers and students; the more cynical teachers have been heard to describe some as "McEnglish". Some recruiters are amazingly slimy and interested only in their commission. Many schools and some recruiters are just fine, but definitely not all. There are plenty of horror stories — horrible accommodation, outrageously large classes, demands for unpaid overtime, late pay, broken contracts, etc. Of course there are lots of happy teachers in other schools, sometimes even in the same school.

One of the tricky things about working abroad is to adapt to local conditions; getting overly upset about things you cannot change is a shortcut to madness. On the other hand, provided you both choose your battles and adapt your tactics to local conditions, fighting for reasonable treatment can also be quite sensible.

The lowest risk jobs are the government-run recruiting programs; these can offer a safe way to get your feet wet. Other government-run places, such as universities and public high schools, are also relatively safe, as are jobs with large international companies.

Some factors indicate higher risk:

• Private language schools are riskier than government programs.
• "Third-world" countries and those with highly corrupt "systems" are also much riskier.
• If a recruiter is involved, your risk is significantly higher; either the school or the recruiter can mess you around.
• If the culture is wildly different from your own, then you may not understand the negotiation process you are involved in or know what questions you should be asking.

That said, thousands of teachers are having a wonderful time in jobs with one or more of those risk factors. Some are perfectly happy in jobs with all four! Be aware of risks and use a little caution, and you should be fine.

Check Wikivoyage and other sources for information on the location. Do a web search on the city name along with terms like "pollution", "corruption" and "gang"; you might expect a few hits for almost any city, but if there's a big problem, this may turn it up. If having modern conveniences and Western food is important to you, check websites for major international retail chains like Ikea or the European supermarkets Metro and Carrefour to see if they have stores there. Ask the school to email you photos of the accommodation and classrooms.

Checking on the job and the employer is harder. The most important precaution: Ask to talk to current foreign teachers before agreeing to anything. Be extremely wary of any school that will not let you do this.

You can also check the web for comments on potential employers or on recruiters. ESL teachers are a chatty bunch, and mostly literate, so there is a lot of information available. Most of the job ad sites have forums that include comments on available jobs. There are also many country-specific forums offering school reviews or just a blacklist of problem schools. Take reviews with a grain of salt, though; even quite a good school may have a few angry ex-employees ranting on the web. Look for other web comments and talk to current teachers before drawing any firm conclusions.

In certain locations, there may be additional risks; we cover the most common ones in Tips for travel in developing countries and Tropical diseases. For some places, Altitude sickness, Cold weather or War zone safety may also be relevant.

Also, ensure that any potential employers are willing to sponsor you for the appropriate visa, as most countries do not allow foreigners to work on a tourist visa or visa waiver, even if you do not overstay. Some employers will instead ask you to make a visa run to the nearest border to save them the hassle of filing the necessary paperwork for a work visa, but this is illegal, and you risk getting jailed, deported and blacklisted from the country if you get caught. The governments of some countries, such as China and Thailand, are aware of this tactic and cracking down on it.

Many web sites offer English teaching jobs; the best-known is Dave's ESL Cafe. Others include Cactus TEFL^{[dead link]}, TEFL.com, LoveTEFL.com, TEFL Org UK, ESL Job Exchange, and Maximo Nivel. One of many employment discussion lists is TESLJob

Fewer web sites offer internship options though they are becoming more popular. For example, The TEFL Academy offers paid internships in countries including China, Thailand and South Korea, while Premier TEFL and TEFL Org UK package their internship offers with their TEFL training courses. Different internships will require different levels of training so read the details carefully.

Web search for phrases like "English teacher" or "ESL job" will turn up dozens more sites. There are also many sites for specific countries or regions; include one or more country or city names in a web search to find those. See also the Work sections of our country articles.

As with everything in the ESL business, some caution is required; some sites are run by recruiters (see cautions below) and some have been accused of censoring discussions in their forums to protect their advertisers from criticism.

There are two major professional associations for ESL teachers, US-based TESOL and British-based IATEFL. Both are international organisations whose members come from all over and are working all around the world. Both publish journals (available in university libraries) and run a website and an annual conference. The journals and websites have job ads and the conferences have a hiring fair. Like most academic organizations, these are more applicable to teachers of TEFL at the university level where service involvement is required for tenure and promotion; the majority of TEFL teachers have little or no involvement with them.

Teachers in many countries have established ELT teaching associations; many are set up as regional affiliates of either TESOL or IATEFL. Like any other job search, networking and finding the people who are "in the know" is a great way to find a job or to learn more about local conditions:

• Arabia — TESOL Arabia
• Bangladesh — BELTA
• South Korea — KOTESOL
• Russian Far East — FEELTA
• Philippines — PALT
• Singapore — Singapore Association For Applied Linguistics
• Thailand — Thailand TESOL
• Taiwan — ETA-ROC

At the very least, read the appropriate site to get a feel for the issues that are important in the country you wish to work in. You may also discover who are the leaders locally and what is currently important. Having this information ready will help with any interview. Some sites will link to posts for job notices. Look for conference announcements and plan a visit; these are excellent chances to look for work.

A few countries have government-run programs for recruiting foreign teachers:

• Chile — English Opens Doors^{[dead link]} (Volunteer posts with very low pay)
• France (including overseas departments) — English Assistant Program^{[dead link]}
• Hong Kong — NET
• Japan — JET
• South Korea — EPIK
• Spain — Auxiliares^{[dead link]}

These generally take new university graduates and do not require teacher training or experience. Most placements are in secondary schools. You may be posted to a rural school where you're the only foreigner for miles around — great for experiencing local culture, not so great if you wanted to move in with your girl/boyfriend in Tokyo/Seoul.

Most of these jobs pay fairly well for entry-level posts, often a bit more than training centers offer to beginning teachers. For example, as of 2013 the Japanese JET program pays ¥3,360,000 (about $33,000) in the first year with increases in subsequent years. These jobs also look fairly good on a resume; anyone hiring English teachers in the region is likely to know these programs and if your next job application will be back home, then listing a national Ministry of Education as your last employer sounds much better than Tomiko's English Academy.

In some countries the State, Province or other entity in charge of education for many cities will also assist schools in finding staff. Contacting the education department directly can lead you to schools needing foreign ESL teachers.

The British Council is the British government's educational and cultural department. Among other things, they are the largest English teaching organisation in the world, running schools in many places.

The Council also handle recruiting for various foreign governments' English programs. Say Elbonia needs a few dozen teachers, or a few higher-level specialists like teacher trainers or curriculum and test designers; the Council will advertise, collect resumes, and produce a short list of candidates. For the actual interviews, senior Elbonian staff can fly to London and use Council facilities to interview, or the Council can handle the interviews too.

For some of these jobs, the Council also provides guarantees for teachers; if a corrupt school official steals your pay or you need to bail out because of a revolution in Elbonia, some Council contracts require compensation and the Council pays it even if they cannot collect from the other government. This does not completely remove the risks, of course, but it does reduce them significantly.

Council jobs can be searched on their web site or look for ads in the Guardian and the Times Education Supplement or Higher Ed. Supplement. Some, but by no means all, of their jobs are restricted to British citizens. Most interviews are in London. British Council schools may also hire locally wherever they are, but these jobs usually do not have benefits like airfare and housing that the London-hired ones do.

The US government runs a few programs in which American citizens can teach English abroad: the English Language Fellow and Specialist programs, the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant program, and some Peace Corps positions. Another program, paid for by government and run by Georgetown university, sends teacher trainers and other experts abroad; it requires a masters degree and US citizenship.

There are a number of large companies in the ESL business, such as English First, International House, Wall Street English and Berlitz. The British Council (see above) might be considered another in this class, though it is rather different in some ways. Any of these has dozens of schools in multiple countries, and all of them are more-or-less continuously recruiting teachers.

There are substantial advantages to working for such a company, especially for novice teachers.

• Any of them tends to have experienced managers, to offer training for teachers, and to pay at competitive (though not always generous) rates.
• Perhaps more important, none of them are at all likely to try the tricks that sleazy recruiters or schools sometimes get up to, such as avoiding the cost of a proper visa by asking teachers to work illegally on a tourist visa or making large profits while paying teachers a pittance as "volunteers" or "interns".
• Given experience in one of these companies, it may be relatively easy to move to another location or to a different job. Consider a teacher who has done a few year's ESL in Indonesia and is ready for a change; any such teacher could look for work in, say, Japan or Prague and have a reasonable chance of finding it. However, a teacher with one of the big companies can seek work at the same company's schools in those places; he or she is likely to have it significantly easier, both in finding work and in adapting to the new school on arrival.
• If you want to make a career in ESL, there may be more opportunities in a large company; there are jobs in management, teacher training and materials development that you can hope to move into.

These are professional organisations, not fly-by-night operators; that is good to know when you contemplate the risks inherent in working abroad, and it may also make one of them look better on your resume than a smaller company.

That said, there is a downside. For one thing, most such companies are franchise operations so conditions at a particular school depend on the local franchise owner as well as the global organisation. Some reports on expatriate-in-wherever bulletin boards claim that certain schools in large chains are utterly awful places to work, generally because at that particular school either the franchise owner or the foreign manager is a twit. Such reports need to be taken with a grain of salt and it is quite common to hear that one location is terrible while another nearby is just fine, but some caution is indicated.

In most cases an experienced teacher with some knowledge of a country can find a better job than these places offer — one with more money, shorter hours, longer holidays or less stress, and sometimes more than one of those. However, for someone new to ESL teaching and/or the country, these places are quite often the best prospect.

Some people on expatriate-in-wherever discussion sites say quite emphatically that you should never consider taking a job if a recruiter is involved. That is likely overstated — other people posting on the same sites often disagree, and some even recommend particular recruiters as honest and useful — but treating recruiters with caution is almost always advisable. In many cases, they create more problems rather than solving any.

Note that this includes various "job search" sites which do not give contact information for actual employers, or even for recruiters other than the company running the site; these are just thinly disguised advertising for a particular recruiter and should be either shunned entirely or used with caution. It also includes various organisations in Western countries that offer ESL training followed by "placement assistance". The training may be useful (see certificates above), but after that they are just a recruiter and should be treated with caution.

Some recruiters want an up-front payment from teachers, a "membership fee", "placement fee" or whatever. In nearly all cases, these should be rejected out-of-hand. Honest recruiters make their money by getting commissions from schools; any who ask for payment from teachers are quite likely scammers. This does seem to vary some from place to place, though; for example, almost no recruiters for China or Thailand ask for an up-front fee, but for Latin America many do.

For volunteer recruiting, see also Volunteer_travel#Be_wary.

If you have a teaching qualification in your own country, but not in ESL — perhaps a biology or history or even English literature teacher — then many English teaching jobs will happily accept you, though some will want an ESL certificate as well.

With such qualifications, consider looking for work at International schools. These are mainly for the children of expatriates, and the fees are generally paid by companies or governments who send staff abroad. The fees are often high, but nobody cares; most parents do not have to pay them and for the parents' employers they are a necessary business expense. In these schools both the educational standards and the teachers' pay rates are similar to those in high-income countries, quite often a bit higher. In most cases pay and conditions are much better than what language teachers get elsewhere. In addition, free education for your own children is often included.

These schools generally want appropriate qualifications for primary or secondary schools, but there is some variation. All want certified teachers, but some restrict that to certifications from a particular country or even state, while others will happily hire certified teachers from anywhere in the English-speaking world. A few will also hire well-qualified ESL teachers – typically degree and CELTA – without schoolteacher certification. Many international schools also look for two years teaching experience in addition to formal qualifications. Many schools conduct interviews on Skype.

There is a Council of International Schools and an International Schools Services directory^{[dead link]}; both sites also have teacher recruitment links. A company called Search Associates^{[dead link]} handles recruiting for a number of schools and runs job fairs in large cities around the world. Many of those schools teach the International Baccalaureate – a high school diploma that most universities in any English-speaking country (and many others) will accept – so another way to find schools is through the IB site. You could also ask embassies or companies with many expatriate staff what schools they use, or ask on an expatriate-in-wherever forum.

A web search for "international school" plus the name of a country or city will also turn some up, but be aware that "international school" is sometimes (certainly in China, possibly elsewhere as well) purely a marketing term, used in promoting any school that teaches some English.

Certified Montessori teachers can also find work in many countries.

Some programs, such as JET in Japan also have positions for experienced sport coaches.

Of course English is not the only language for which there is demand. There are jobs around the world for teachers of any major world language, though often not as many as for English teachers.

Various governments sponsor organisations to promote their nations' languages, and offer jobs for speakers of those languages.

• Chinese: Confucius Institute^{[dead link]}
• French: Alliance Française
• German: Goethe Institute
• Greek: Center for the Greek Language
• Italian: Società Dante Alighieri
• Japanese: Japan Foundation
• Korean: King Sejong Institute^{[dead link]}
• Portuguese: Instituto Camoes
• Russian: Russkiy Mir Foundation^{[dead link]}
• Spanish: Cervantes Institute

Universities and high schools abroad, or training centers that mainly teach English, may also hire teachers for other major languages. Some countries, such as China, have universities that specialise in teaching foreign languages. As for English teachers, international schools often have better pay and conditions than other places.

Many Western universities offer some sort of year abroad program, often in co-operation with a foreign university. For students of the language or history of some remote part of the world, these may be a fine opportunity. Typically there are fees which you would not pay if you went on your own, but on the other hand you get credits from the Western university for your foreign studies.

There are two main types of program; examples here are from China but similar things are available in other places.

• Some programs, e.g. Berkeley, offer full time study of the foreign language. Often these are fairly flexible about time; a year, a semester or a summer are all possible.
• Others give some language and teaching training, then place you as an English teacher in the host country. Usually these require a longer commitment, typically a year. The advantage is that you make at least enough to live on.

Volunteer positions are usually for a shorter term and may or may not include room and board. For details see Volunteer.