Ask Headmaster Ken

Is there really a hiring policy or rule that says if you are 60 and over you will not be hired? I am 62 and have sent my resume and other supporting documents to dozens of recruiters without success.

This is a recurring question on all China ESL forums.

To my knowledge, there is no such regulation, and if there is, it is only rarely and selectively enforced.

I personally know or have known many teachers actively teaching well beyond the age of 60 or even 65.

My suggestion is to redouble your efforts.

I'd like to add a few of my thoughts to this discussion.

The English teaching job market in China is highly influenced by the law of supply and demand. Due to the economic crisis in the West, teaching jobs in China have become extremely competitive. I screen job applications for a couple of private schools in China and, just two years ago, applications from teachers with real bachelor's degrees comprised no more than 20 percent or so of the total pool. Today, almost all our applicants have bachelor's degrees and over 25 percent have master's degrees.

I think the time has come in which just being a white native-speaker is no longer good enough for finding a job as an English teacher in China, generally speaking. There will still be opportunities at private English language schools in relatively undesirable locations throughout China for those who are non-degreed or either too young or old (under 22 or over 60-years of age, respectively) but even those types of opportunities are becoming fewer in number as teachers with bachelor's degrees are losing the more competitive positions to candidates with master's and even doctoral degrees.

I also know foreign English teachers in China who are in their 60s and even 70s, but they have been here for quite awhile and, also, they are highly qualified in most instances. I think it will be very difficult for a 62-year old man to find work as an English teacher in China if he has never taught before and doesn't hold a minimum of a bachelor's degree. It's not impossible, but he would need to focus his job search in areas like Inner Mongolia and, perhaps, the northeast of China as well, e.g., Liaoning or Heilongjiang Provinces.

Ken Hayes, M.Ed. wrote:This is a recurring question on all China ESL forums.

To my knowledge, there is no such regulation, and if there is, it is only rarely and selectively enforced.

I personally know or have known many teachers actively teaching well beyond the age of 60 or even 65.

My suggestion is to redouble your efforts.

I am pretty certain there is an age limit for a Foreign Expert status which is the ticket most schools use for the Z-Visa... how that is enforced varies from place to place.

I got hired into my second teaching job in China at 63 (CIE Economics), but my Shanghai school has a problem renewing my contract in the year I will be 65. Various provinces, schools and administrations have differing interpretations. It will get tougher to land a decent teaching job as you approach the Chinese retirement age of 60. Even tougher beyond.

Some comments based upon my own experiences with recruiters:

The problem you are having can be attributed to your reliance upon recruiters. I am 60. I have a fairly recent MA in History with 2 years of teaching experience while I was a grad student, no TEFL/TESOL training and several years as a contract researcher afterward.

In other words, I am not a prime candidate for teaching TEFL in China, but I did expect that my degree would produce some results. I applied to many recruiters and the most usual response was none, but two did put a little effort into it, and one even found me a job, although it was something of a bait and switch and that job turned out to be not suitable.

It gradually became crystal clear to me that recruiters are solely focused on getting the commission for themselves or their company rather than upon finding a job for any specific candidate. So I decided that I was going to have to do that for myself if it was going to get done.

I have already described in some detail in another post on this site how I prepared my list, so I won’t go into any detail on that here now, but basically I did a cold mailing to a list of roughly 50 universities in my target area. Some of them I did twice after I came up with the idea of including an MP3 of me reading a blurb about why I would be a good person to hire.

The results from this were just a little overwhelming. I was shortlisted by 15 different universities and received offers from most of those. I accepted an offer nearly 3 weeks ago and I am still receiving offers.

This is quite a change from the feeling that I was beginning to get as a result of my efforts using recruiters, so my advice would be to dump the recruiters and do it on your own.