Interac Reviews

The biggest problem is that there is no room for career advancement. The foreign country experience might look decent on a resume but while others are furthering their careers, teachers at Interac are spinning their wheels and setting themselves up to return home to work at a McJob. It's something to really consider. You'll be in a completely dishonest work environment, both in the schools and when dealing with Interac. The Japanese call it "Tatemae," and as you move up the ranks from baka (stupid) to just somewhat KY (ignorant of the situation) you can try to play along pretending you enjoy your job as they pretend that you're valuable. Even the foreigners that get promoted to managers are still very replaceable and they know it, so they pass all their stress down to the teachers. My MC looked like he'd aged a decade in two years. Eventually it will kill your soul if you have one, and when you wake up one day with an inexplicable urge to do something terminally unkind to yourself you'll realize "Aha, I've had the quintessential Japanese worker experience" and it will be time for you to go home.

-Less pay/benefits compared to JET but if you could get into JET you wouldn't be here anyways. -You're experience will vary wildly depending on where you're placed/what school you get. You can get a school that expects you to walk in and do a 50 minute lesson the first day or a school that never expects you do do a lesson at all and just kind of assist the teacher with having kids repeat stuff in English, maybe play some warm-up games, it all depends on where you end up. Some schools are really into using ALTs some are much less so -Months with lots of time off have partial pay (the specifics are on the website) -There's about 2 weeks of training, but it's kind of up to you to figure out how to be a teacher -In my opinion this is not a long-term position, there are people who stay in it for a long time but there's no advancement you'll basically be in the same job at the same pay forever, but you can definitely take the job and look for better jobs throughout your year with interac, many places only hire people already in Japan -Supposedly they are into this dumb tearing you down and building you up mentality when it comes to training, my training only had a tiny bit of that element, but I've hear from people who had pretty bad training experiences particularly in Tokyo. -This is not a job for people looking to be like English teaching professor legends it's a job for people who want to goof around with Japanese kids and try to make their English class more fun while getting to experience living in Japan, I put this as a con because some people go in thinking they are going to be doing a lot more serious teaching than they are. -Co-workers who are bad with money and living way above their means complaining -Interac has to tell you to follow rules that nobody actually follows like no team teaching in certain areas which I did all year both years all the time mostly -Japanese schools are seriously lacking in ways to discipline their kids because they can't suspend them. That means if you get an awful kid everybody wants to strangle they can't kick him/her out, although you can talk to interac/the teachers you work with if there's a problem life a kid being rude to you a lot and they may be able to help out a lot with that.