Life After TEFL

For the four weeks of your intensive TEFL course you will likely be busy and stressed with the workload, the culture and time shift, and trying to set up a new life including finding a job and place to live. Sound hard? It can be, but the most surprising difficulty tends to be the free time. It's counter intuitive a bit, but your days in TEFL are EXTREMELY full, you have something to do all the time and not too much time to worry and dwell on anything but the course.

After TEFL people sometimes find themselves awash in a sea of time and a foreign city with an hour or two a day looking for a job and then nothing to do but worry or mope. There's two main issues during this time: worry about jobs and isolation/depression.

Don't worry, there's hope. Provided you went to a decent TEFL program and you aren't too visibly crazy (notice you can still be crazy), you will find a job before too long even in tougher markets, particularly if your program has any help for job assistance. TEFL is a very transient workforce and there are ALWAYS openings.

The real trick is filling the time between the end of TEFL and the beginning of your work. This sounds easy but can be tough in a city where you know few people and have no routines or 'favorite' spots. The key to this is COMMUNITY. You just arrived so it's unlikely you will have a longstanding and family-like community unless it is a part of the culture of your school.

This is one of the benefits of TLH TEFL. We operate a small course and when you graduate you have shared an experience with everyone that has taken the course. Whether in February of 2006 or April of 2011, you both have enjoyed the "Evil Company" lesson and spent nights in smokey pubs studying for the dreaded Grammar Test. More than this simple connection though, TLH constantly keeps old and new classes in contact with each other both online and in person at events. One of the strongest selling points is the sense of community which often solves both of the previously mentioned problems. Should you choose to stay in Prague, an overwhelming number of our graduates find work, flats and information through other graduates in the city, which is more than simple job assistance or community.