Business by Janice

In a word, there would be chaos.

One of the most frustrating parts of running a business is when there exists an obstacle which hinders you from satisfying a demand and therefore from selling.  I often ask myself, why can’t American teachers get work visas when the demand for English is so huge?

It doesn’t make sense.

I haven’t done a great deal of research into this, I presume the Spanish government believes that there are enough qualified Spanish teachers of English to satisfy demand and that’s why they won’t give any quota on this immigration category.  What the government don’t appear to understand however is our market works; how many times have you heard clients say they want a native? Ok, they might accept a Romanian or Polish teacher (who are usually excellent with grammar by the way),  but a Spanish teacher of English is largely frowned upon.

We would love to employ American teachers, I love their work ethic, they’re generally enthusiastic and hard working but  the risk is immense, it’s one thing to have an inspection and to be found to have some errors in the contracts of European teachers and quite another to be found to be “employing” illegals. The fine can close your business. Is it worth the risk?

Apparently, for lots of schools in Madrid, yes, they feel that it’s still worth taking the risk, although I believe more and more are becoming cautious and  saying no. I’m amazed however by how many American teachers come here to do TEFL and then believe they can get a job when they know they will be illegal.

The ideal situation would be for qualifed non EU teachers to receive work visas of one to two years. Everyone would be happy, schools would have a wider choice of teachers and could therefore pay more attention to finding the right teacher for  a certain profile of class, the non EU teachers would at last be able to work for the reputable schools, clients would get their classes covered more quickly and those Spanish teachers of English whose strong accent gets in the way of giving effective classes wouldn’t be affected as they rarely got assigned classes in the first place!

Does anyone out there reading this know if there’s anything happening about this situation? Does anyone or group of people even have the energy never mind the time to lobby for action in this area?

I know we don’t live in a perfect world, and in fact, the TEFL world is much less than perfect in many respects, but when we have such an imbalance between the demand for English and the supply of teachers who can teach it, surely SOMETHING  can be done.

Firstly, my apologies for leaving it so long between posts, I had a problem with accessing the page coupled with the usual hectic period of September/October setting up courses, recruiting etc.

It’s come to my attention that many prospective new clients are really putting pressure on getting price down which I suppose is quite understandable given the current economic conditions.

Will schools concede on this and will quality be affected?

Margins are really low in this industry to start with and if competition gets any fiercer, we may well see the standard of service decline in terms of communication with the client, mix ups with class organisation etc. It’s very unlikely (if other academy owners have any common sense) that teacher rates will be reduced to rebalance the margin on classes, as we’re still experiencing a shortage of teachers especially here in Madrid. Teachers can choose where to work and they’re certainly not going to, and shouldn’t, work for peanuts.

Time and time again we try to point out to clients that it’s not the PRICE that is important, it’s the COST of classes. A company can contract the cheapest language school in the city, but if that school is employing non qualiified and inexperienced teachers, the cost to that company is HUGE as the students won’t make the desired progress. The company might as well flush their money down the drain.  If budgets ARE tight, It’s a much more sensible to contract fewer classes with a school that guarantees quality, thereby ensuring  a return on investment on those students receiving quality teaching.

In any crisis it’s inevitable that there is some reshuffling of position in the market to maintain  a certain level of business.  Some  schools however, stressed out by fighting fires all day, may decide that it’s not worth it  any more. If you no longer enjoy your workas you have less and less resources with which to run your business and provide a decent service, what’s the point?

Quite frankly I refuse to be pulled into this doom and gloom. I’m not saying that these aren’t challenging times but if we fan the fire with pessimism we just get pulled futher down into “problems”.

I love the saying, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”. If an economic crisis means you have to be more creative in looking for clients (who’ll pay your rates), so be it - at least you hone your sales and marketing skills. If it means you have to monitor your budgets more carefully, fine, again this experience adds to your business skills.

There is always a positive side to every negative situation and those who ARE positive stand out, they attact good things to them. (For those of you who know anything about the Law of Attraction, you’ll know where I’m coming from, more about that in later posts).

So, will quality in our sector be sacrificed in the “Crisis”?  - Only if you want it to be.