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Originally Posted by ChisaChi
Eep, that's a bit too rural for me. I want to have some decent public transport at least...
I have heard stories of people putting down the Tokyo prefecture(?) as a preference thinking they'd be close to Tokyo, then ending up on tiny islands from which it takes longer to get to Tokyo than most of the rest of Japan, heheh. Although I suppose island life would be fun in it's own way.
I know the JET selection process is reputed to be almost random, but are there many applicants that got through with no teaching experience at all? A lot of people I've seen around seem to have teaching ambitions and qualifications, and plenty seem to have done a lot of tutoring and volunteer teaching. I don't have any of these things, which worries me a bit. Although I do have a year to do something about it, I suppose.
Another question! Do private companies hire ALT's mid-year? I know they try do most of their hiring for the start of the school year in April, but I've heard of JET alternates getting upgraded as late as August. If I didn't think I'd get through and looked around for a private position in June or July, would there be any?
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The islands off the coast of Tokyo is a true story, they do have 1 or 2 JETS out there, and a few other prefectures have something similar. But with 6000+ JETS, the chances of getting one of those places is pretty remote (pun intended)
From my experience, either some background in teaching or desire to teach, or background in Japan/Japanese, is quite helpful on your resume, and if ou have both, it's a big plus. I had no experience with Japanese really, but I had a History/Soc Sci teaching degree and several years experience teaching art. I think those helped get me through to the interview stage, and in my prefecture, I'd say about 30% of the people had teaching experience, 30% Japanese experience, and 40% had neither (maybe a couple people had both).
It was interesting, because for those of us with teaching experience, actually teaching in the classes wasn't too stressful because we were used to teaching a room full of kids. But getting by outside of school with little to no Japanese was the harder part to learn. Conversely, those with Japanese experience found getting around outside of school to be relatively easy, but would sometimes stress over teaching the classes. So we tended to help each other out.
Private companies are always looking for new teachers, if they have openings (and they usually did, but with Nova going under, there are a lot of out of work English teachers over there now, so it's probably a lot tougher private market at the moment.)