Length of Contract

Qualifications
To qualify for the E2 work visa and a teaching job as an ESL instructor, you must be an “English native speaker”, which means that you have to come from the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa. You must also have a University degree. You are not required to have teaching qualifications, although having them will mean that you are able to get better jobs.

Salary
Your salary will be in the range of 2.0 - 2.5 million won a month, depending on your qualifications and experience. You will be paid at the end of every month, either directly in cash to you or to your Korean bank account.

Severance Pay
AAt the completion of your 12-month contract, you will be entitled to a severance package of one month’s average salary. Some institute owners try to arrange 50 or even 51-week contracts in order to avoid this, but we refuse to refer any teachers to these.

Hours and Overtime
You will be expected to work between 25 and 30 hours a week. Most jobs are Mon to Fri, but some are for Saturdays also, with less average hours per day.

You will usually be expected to put in at least one hour’s unpaid preparation each day towards your classes, and some employers insist that you arrive at work early to do this.

Most contracts stipulate that the employer is entitled to ask you to work up to 35 hours a week, provided that he or she pays you the overtime rate for the extra hours. If he or she wants you to work over 35 hours a week then you only have to do so if you agree to.

Overtime rates are usually between 15,000 and 20,000 won per hour.

Taxes
Your employer will take out Korean taxes from your salary before giving them to you. These will be between 3.5 to 5% of your salary.

Medical Insurance
Your employer will enroll you in the Korean Medical Insurance Union, which entitles you to the same rate for medical services and prescriptions as for Korean citizens (uninsured rates are much higher). The cost for this will come to 3% of your salary, which will either be paid fully by the employer, split between you, or paid by yourself depending on your contract.

Housing
The employer will provide furnished rent-free accommodation for your time in Korea, usually close to your place of employment or if not then close to public transportation. You will be expected to pay the utilities such as gas, water, and electricity yourself or with your flatmates.

“Furnished” means the bare-minimum, such as beds, bed-linen, washing machine, and kitchen with gas range and fridge, and possibly table and chairs for the living room. Most give much more than this, but some don’t ? do not automatically expect a land-line (most foreigners buy cellphones), TVs, DVD players, microwaves, chests of drawers, and desks.

The accommodation is usually shared with other foreign teachers ? Korean teahers usually don’t get accommodation provided. Alternatively, sometimes you will be given a single “studio apartment” instead ? be aware that these are just one room with a very small bathroom and kitchen. Either way, Korean accommodation is probably much smaller than you are used to, and you are very unlikely to have any kind of garden.

Vacations
You will be entitled to all Korean national holidays, and your employer is not allowed to deny you any of these. There usually come to about 10 days per year.

In addition you will be given usually about 10 days paid vacation for the duration of your contract. You will have to let your employers know well in advance of when you intend to take them, which is usually not a problem whatsoever, but you may want to plan trips around Chinese New Year’s (usually in February), Korean Thanksgiving (usually in September) and Christmas/New Year’s vacations very early on because most foreign teachers want to take their vacations then but of course institutes can’t afford to have all their foreign teachers go on vacation at the same time. For this reason some employers refuse to hire couples.

If you are given more than 10 paid vacation days you may not be able to take them all at once because of the inconvenience that would cause, and many contracts only allow you to take say, half of them in winter and half in summer.

Dress code
This is rarely mentioned in a contract, and a few institutes are very relaxed about what you wear to teach, especially if you are teaching children or kindergarten students, but most do have some form of dress code. This can be as minimal as not allowing you to wear shorts to insisting on dress suits and shirts and ties, no matter how hot the weather is. Either way, you will notice that your Korean coworkers will usually be expected to dress much more formally than foreign teachers.

We can find out the requirements for your school for you before you leave, but we recommend that you bring at least 2 sets of formal clothes with you to Korea regardless, as you can use them for special occasions and interviews in the future.

‘Additional Employment’
A tricky issue this. Sooner or later, you are probably going to be asked in hushed tones (so that your employer can’t hear) by a student’s parents, or the students themselves, if you would be willing to teach them privately, usually for a rate of 25,000 ? 30,000 won an hour. This practice of teaching “privates” is widespread in Korea.

Until a few years ago this was completely illegal, and if discovered you would be faced with heavy fines and even deportation. Korea is a very egalitarian country, and the government frowns on the system because it favors the rich (although institutes do too of course). Also, your employer would suffer because the student would more than likely no longer come to the institute.

Now, it is actually legal to teach privately per se, but contracts specifically stipulate that you can’t without the permission of the employer. Either way, the effect is the same ? if you are found to be breaking the conditions of your contract, you can expect heavy fines and/or even deportation.

We leave it up to you. 95% of foreigners that tutor are discreet and have no problems, but the other 5% getting deported are not just rumors.

Finishing your employment early
Most contracts state that you have to give 60 days notice to your employers. Your employer will probably let you leave earlier, especially if you find a teacher to replace you, but the employer can not insist that the task of finding a replacement is entirely up to you and not allow you to leave after 60 days if either of you haven’t found one.

In order for you to leave legally and find new employment again in Korea, your employer and you will have to go to the local immigration department and sign a “letter of release” releasing you from your old contract. You will then need to leave the country, but are free to look for another job and obtain a new E-2 Visa for a new job.

You will not be legally entitled to severance pay if you leave early.

If your employer only provided funds for a one-way ticket to Korea then you will not receive funds for a ticket back if you leave early.

If your employer provided funds for a return-ticket to Korea then if you leave early you are legally (and morally) required to pay half of these back to the employer.


Leaving bad jobs without notice and your responsibilities
We don’t place teachers in bad jobs! And please please please contact us as soon at the first sign of trouble and well before things get so bad that you want to do a “midnight run”. But of course this does not help you if you do get into such a dire situation that you have to quit your job immediately, and so you need to know your legal situation.

Unfortunately, the legal system is heavily biased in favor of the employer of the institute. We don’t like saying this, but any recruiting company is irresponsible in not pointing it out. Because, in a nutshell, if you do a midnight run then you are unlikely to be able to work legally in Korea for many years.

Most foreigners find this out after leaving Korea, finding a new job, and waiting for a new E-2 Visa. Unless the employer has already informed the immigration department that you have left, then as far as the immigration department knows you are still working for your old employer. Applying for a new job before your original contract has expired will bring this to light, and the immigration department will contact the employer to find out the situation. If you wait until the original contract has expired, then you may (but are still unlikely to - see below) be able to find another job in Korea.

More likely your old employer has already informed the immigration department anyway, telling them something like “that crazy foreigner was a lazy alcoholic pedophile who stole money from us and then disappeared”. If this is the case, then it may be years before you are allowed a new visa. This is the big flaw in the system ? as far as immigration is concerned, the institute isn’t terrible, it just keeps getting sent terrible foreign teachers. Even working perfectly legally at an institute for only 3 months raised some problems for one of us once, because immigration officials took one look at the dates and thought “hmmm, another quitter”.

Like we say, we screen our employers and will be there to stop things from getting so bad that you want to leave. But we can’t prevent or be legally liable for employers engaging in criminal acts that make you want to leave Korea ? no-one can. But very very very few teachers feel like they need to do a midnight run, and of those that do it is usually their fault ? they leave simply because they don’t have a dishwashing machine, don’t like getting up at 7am, and/or can’t find a girlfriend. It happens all the time. Because the employers invest lots of money to bring teachers here then the Immigration Department is certainly entitled to stop “teachers” like this from wasting other employer’s time and money.

Most employers can’t actually be bothered to be vindictive about a teacher that leaves early, and immigration department officials don’t always care about how long you were at your last job, so it is true that many teachers have been able to find work in Korea again. But you need to be aware that you can’t just quit your job because you feel like it and expect to have no problems finding new employment.