Teach English in Beautiful Taiwan

New TEFL teacher, Shane Taiwan is good and secure. Guaranteed hours, reasonable pay and work load. DoS was helpful, training and support was good. Small class averages and little to no admin.

Recruitment process was easy, via Saxoncourt, lots of info before I went out there and the support on arrival was good. I was pleased to have secured a job before I flew to Taiwan.

Paid on time. Management at my school were friendly and helpful. Kids were great. Never had any issues with the material it is straight forward and easy to teach. They are growing really quickly. Everyone tries hard.

New teacher newly TEFL qualified.
Guaranteed hours, reasonable pay and work load. DoS was helpful, training and support was good. Small class averages and little to no admin.

Recruitment process was easy, via Saxoncourt, lots of info before I went out there and the support on arrival was good. I was pleased to have secured a job before I flew to Taiwan.

Had to work on Saturdays at DTE, Franchises you don't have to. Sometimes I had to cover classes at short notice.

Shane is professional and I was recruited from the UK via Saxoncourt. You will do well if you want to be a proper teacher and not here to mess around. They are really helpful with the visa and arrival stuff. And I have learned a lot and developed. The training was good and my DoS was helpful.

Can be a lot of work at times. Especially if you put in extra prep for to your classes Pay could be higher, but Taiwan pay rates have not changed in 5 years. Starting pay is around NT$600.

Support and training was good. I left another company to come to Shane was referred to by a friend and they were a good employer. The kids are great and the DoS was helpful. Everyone at my school was really nice.
Apply on their website as they help you with arrival and visa stuff. The recruitment process was easy. I applied and was there within a month. It was a good experience and helped me develop.

I worked at Shane for the last year, and I was really happy at my school. I was working at DTE and there was a lot of support from my DoS. I was a new teacher and the training week was really helpful.

I had to sub a little at the start before my schedule came into place but it was ok. I taught 20hrs a week which enabled me to do so much. I learnt Chinese in the mornings and then worked in the afternoons and evenings.

Most of the staff were helpful and the Head Office staff were good. My only issue was the initial hotel. I worked at DTE but a lot of my friends worked at the franchise schools and so they had their weekends off. All the teachers are qualified and I had a 120hr online TEFL when I started, I am now doing a CELTA.

The classes and material was fun to teach and open ended so I could be creative. SPEC is good and is the most fun to teach. But some of the phonics books needed some TLC.

I left because I wanted to teach in Europe and also go back to school. Taiwan is awesome.

Shane is one of 3 large chain schools in Taiwan. They have branches in virtually every neighborhood of the island. The idea is that kids of all ages come straight from school to their after school program, which means they usually open up within a block or two of each school. There are benefits to working for a large school, but you should know what you're getting into.
I remember that my boss once told me she was calling the head office to "Order a new teacher," sort of the way you might order a sweater from gap.com. This is really the mentality they have towards teachers in general. They bring in an enormous amount of foreigners each year, mostly who have no teaching experience, BA's in unrelated fields and marginal cultural sensitivities. They have developed a curriculum that any white faced monkey could teach. The students do learn and make progress, though not at a speed that I was comfortable with.
The job is not hard, once you get a feel for it. It will take more out of you than sitting in an office, but it's pretty fair to expect to start your work day after lunch and end only shortly after dinner. You'll be making less in your first year than the average salary, but remember that if you're taking this job, you probably have absolutely no teaching experience. If you do, you may be making a relatively comparable salary. You'll never make **big bucks** of other teaching jobs, but you'll be plenty comfortable and rarely stressed. The job leaves you with enough time and money to enjoy Taiwan, learn Chinese, get into trouble, make friends or do whatever you please.
Shane certainly has it's problems. Most of them go with the territory of a large operation. You should know what you're getting into before hand. Much to their credit, they spell out exactly what you'll be doing and how you'll be paid in the contract, no more no less. This puts them a big step above other schools. I taught there for one year and then moved on. It was probably the best year of my life. I learned an enormous amount, I had a great deal of fun and grew up a great deal. I often complained about Shane while I worked there, then I took a much higher paying job with an extremely disrespectful boss at a mismanaged school that never paid me what they promised.
Shane is what it is: it sets a low bar which it meets every time. I'm sure there are better schools out there, but I learned the hard way that there are also far worse.

Overall, I would say that my experience at Shane was good. It was my first teaching position and my first time in Taiwan. For the most part, I would say that the school is a bit more professional than some of the other foreign owned English teaching schools and certainly more professional than the English schools set up by local proprietors.

Shane does provide an initial teaching orientation, which helps in gaining your footing if you've never taught before. The pay is slightly lower than other schools, but as others have stated that seems to be balanced out by being part of a responsive and organized school i.e., your concerns are generally addressed and the admin in the head office do try to help.

There were three aspects which I did not particularly like. The first is with respect to taking days off. While the Shane program does have an organized request based vacation system, this does not necessarily work in practice. For example, all of the English teachers tend to want the same days off - usually clustered around specific holidays of times of the year. I found that admin tended to have first choice to take off such days for themselves and then tried to accommodate everyone after. The second problem I had, and one which I do not have a solution for, is Shane's "on-call" system. Every few weeks each teacher is "on-call" on their day off and must be prepared to go in to substitute for any other English teacher who happens not to go into their job on that day. Needless to say, this can be a drawback and - in practice - takes away one of your days off fairly frequently. If you are working for the money, however, this may not be as much of a concern. Lastly, Shane has a dress code. For men they require a button down shirt and tie. Although this isn't a huge issue, Taiwan is a hot and humid place and there are those times when you look at your non-Shane colleagues with envy for not being drenched in sweat.

Overall, a solid program, especially for those new to teaching.

We've all read horror stories of working for schools that treat you badly, don't pay you on time, don't know what they are doing, make excuses for everything. Well at Shane you don't need to worry about all that. They have western managers and all the systems are crystal clear and fair. If you can get a job with them you are onto a good thing.