Tips from Expert Georgie from Teacher’s Friend

From volunteering on a remote island to working on a yacht, there are so many cool ways to live and work abroad. Just picture yourself working as a guide in a far off destination, being an au pair jet setting around Europe, or teaching English in a country you only read about in books. Teaching abroad is not only a popular job for native speakers, but also the focus of this post.

We’ve traveled around the world for years as digital nomads. On our first round the world adventure together, Charles worked in Australia in a greenhouse, and I edited academic essays and worked remotely as a technical writer. Years later, we started this site, and made our living as travel bloggers but it was a lot of years in the making and a lot of short and long contract work in the middle.

We’ve gotten a lot of emails from you all over the years about how to get a job teaching English overseas, but while we’ve worked remotely, we’ve never taught abroad. So we brought in Georgie Snape of Teacher’s Friend, who’s an expert on teaching overseas. In our chat, she shares some incredibly helpful tips on everything you need to know, from how to get your first teaching job, to choosing a TEFL course, to the best countries for teaching overseas.

The YouTube video of our interview with Georgie is going up in couple of days, so make sure you’re subscribed to our channel, and have notifications turned on so you don’t miss it!

Micki: So, how did you get into teaching?

Georgie: I don’t actually remember this, but when I eventually went to teach, my friends were like, ‘Oh, you’ve been going on about this since you were 14.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I have?’

So I think I wanted to learn to travel from a young age. I did a degree in community drama, so instead of being an actor on stage, I was running workshops within the community, helping marginalized groups. I naturally learned a lot of the skills I would need to be a teacher.

I knew teaching was a good way to travel, and I love teaching as well. I graduated and did my dissertation, which was project-based, at the same time as doing my TEFL course. In hindsight, that was a terrible idea, but it meant I was ready to go as soon as I finished my degree.

Micki: Where have you taught English?

I spent three months in Vietnam, traveling, and then I came back to teaching again in Vietnam.

Then I moved to Australia and New Zealand, which a lot of people don’t think of as destinations for teaching English abroad, but there are…