Wish I'd worked somewhere else

I've been teaching EFL for a long time, and I don't think ILA is a good place to work whether you have experience or not. They don't really give you what's advertised. I was under the impression that I'd be making more money when I started this job based on estimates their HR coordinator gave me, but I probably made about 65% of what they put on, and they were completely unwilling to offer any of the reimbursements they offered when I took the job. Moreover, working there has been really unrewarding. Many of my coworkers were given a non-performance based $800 bonus earlier this year and I wasn't because my contract started in a different month.

The facilities are really bad where I work. They go on about how you can use Ipads and interactive whiteboards in your lesson, but the IWBS are usually broken and actually using an Ipad is way more trouble than it's worth because a bunch of Vietnamese games have been downloaded on them, their wifi is always messed up, and the staff hardy ever charge the things. Moreover, everything has to be done through their server (e.g. printing, using Word, playing an audio track from a coursebook CD), and there's some kind of problem with it at least once a week. There's not enough equipment in the office where I work, so sometimes the lack of resources combined with their crappy server means that it can take 40 minutes to print a handout for my class. That's assuming all of their junk even works right. I've lost count of the times I've come into work early to do something specific and haven't been able to because of either some IT or facilities related issue. None of these things have improved over time; it actually seems like things have been getting worse because they keep trying to deploy new crap without really testing it first.

The classes are run like a business. I've done level testing there and have seen students put into classes two levels above what I assigned them to because there wasn't an open class and the front office staff just wanted their commission. The great part about that is getting to hear all of my coworkers complain about it and put the blame on "whoever did the level test." Anytime there's been a problem with one of the students in my class, the management has been reluctant to address it. I once had a class with a special needs student who regularly turned violent toward other students, and after addressing this with the management, it took over a month before they removed him from the class (hence the low safety rating I gave on here). This kid would hit other children unprovoked, try to knock over desks, and randomly take his clothes off. The only reason they removed him from the class was because I said I wasn't going to teach it if I went there the next day and saw him, and they probably thought it would be too much trouble to get anyone else to do it because the kid had already been passed on to me from someone else.

Moreover, a lot of people I've worked with don't take their jobs seriously. They constantly call in sick because it's raining or something and wing all of their classes, but I get treated the same as them. This place is a backpacker school intent on fleecing Vietnamese people. Don't work for them.