Jordon Campbell is from Toronto, Canada. He has been living in Spain for three years, teaching as a TEFL instructor and English teacher. He graduated from university with honours in Psychology and Spanish. His hobbies include traveling, learning languages, cooking, taking pictures, playing sports and many more.
What is your favorite travel memory?
My favorite travel memory that I have is when I was about 20 and traveled to Lille, France to play basketball.
The reason this is my favorite travel memory is because this trip changed my life completely. It was my first time in Europe, and it made me realize that there’s a whole new world outside of the Americas and that I needed to learn other languages. I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t be understood and that I couldn’t understand what was being said around me.
After my time in France, I was hit with the travel bug, and wanted to live abroad and also learn more languages.
What is the best story you've heard from a return student?
I don’t have one story in particular that was the best story I’ve heard, but I’ve heard many of the same stories that I love hearing. For example, the majority of my students are uprooting their life, taking extreme risks, sometimes risking it all, to move to Spain to start over.
The first day they come into my class they are excited, but also extremely nervous, and sometimes scared because they don’t know what to expect or how they are going to make their life work in Spain because they’ve never taught before. After taking the course, I love when they come back or if I meet them outside of work, they always tell me how happy they are that they made the jump to move to Spain, how they love teaching, how they were able to make it work and how my class has prepared them for teaching in Spain.
If you could go on any program that your company offers, which one would you choose and why?
If I could go on any program that my company offers, I would go to the surfing program.
We offer a surfing program at our school that allows our students to learn how to surf in either France, Portugal, Spain, and Morocco. During the program, we also offer yoga classes, skateboarding classes and many more. Everything is included in the price, from travelling costs, food costs, living costs, and supplies for surfing.
The surfing program is small which allows the instructors to spend more time attending to each student and helping them to achieve their goals throughout the trip. It’s a great experience to travel/experience a new country, meet new people, become one with nature, and just have a great time in a new country learning new skills.
What makes your company unique? When were you especially proud of your team?
Our organization is special because we really pride ourselves on being the best TEFL program in Madrid, Spain. We offer our students small classes with native speakers, and flexible hours for our students. That’s important because it’s absolutely necessary to be able to focus on how people do things individually, and you can’t do that with a big class, and being rigid with schedules. A tight-knit academy, and a great bunch of people, means that everyone gets along with each other.
I also really like that we’re all working together to create something very big for the academy. All of us will benefit from this teamwork, and will really push our careers forward. We don’t see English slowing down, so I like being on the forefront of something special.
What do you believe to be the biggest factor in being a successful company?
The biggest factors in my opinion for being a successful company is having a great rapport with your employees and customers, great customer service, and staying true to your word. If your company promises something to their customers, they need to fulfill those promises and deliver whatever it is that their customer promises.
If a company can do this, it will be successful.
