Pros
-Had great co-teachers, and made life long friends -Lots of options for professional growth -Will provide you with a valid work visa, and are very helpful with the work visa process. They will also provide you with a lot of support when you first come to China, which is very helpful for people who don't understand Chinese -Lots of materials and resources, you can easily teach classes here without making any kind of worksheet or flashcard yourself -Swanky events during the winter months. Christmas party and the Annual General Meeting are fun
Cons
-Pays badly for the amount of work they expect you to do - Treats their teachers like products -Bonus system is bad - your DoS can essentially take away ~1200rmb a quarter if they don't like you -Micromanaging hell -Obsessed with bespoke lesson planning. I understand that lesson planning is important for all levels, but if a teacher has to plan 10+ lessons a week it's understandable that they might take shortcuts by copy-pasting some things from the Teacher Notes that EF provides. The fact that we're not just discouraged from using EF's lesson notes, but actively punished if we do use them, is outrageous- what's the point in having them if we can't use them!? -Dysfunctional management that will prioritize money over basically everything else. Poor at communicating with teachers. Will actively lie and threaten employees if they ask questions they don't want to answer. During the online teaching period, they gave out a myriad of warnings for stupid things in order to save money (because a warning means you don't get your bonus for that quarter) -Professional growth is bad - the teachers teaching it have no idea what they're doing. The only benefit to doing the professional development with EF is the certificate you get at the end saying you did it - Will mistreat 'bad' employees. Some of the 'bad' employees I worked with included: people who took sick leave, people who talked about pay openly, people who were critical of decisions from the company, people who didn't write enough WeChat comments, people who did unconventional things for their classes (play instruments, for example), people who played game consoles during their break (which would be understandable if it weren't for the fact that they have no problem with teachers watching TV on their laptops, or even playing games on their phones), people who were too busy during the online teaching period to come into the office (some teachers had ~25 teaching hours during that time, and they also had to make PPTs for every class during that time because EF's resources didn't translate well to online teaching), etc, etc... -Treat people who 'break contract' like garbage, regardless of how much good work they did during their time with the company. I honestly would have considered working with them again (because getting a work visa for China can be difficult, so the fact that they provide one really is a huge plus for new teachers) if it weren't for the way I was treated when I left.
