Profi-Lingua - Still dodgy/shady?

Hi everyone

First post, please be gentle :)

I was considering teaching English in Poland. I do not have a CELTA / TESOL certificate but do have several years experience teaching at university, although not teaching English subjects.

I did some 'cold-calling' via e-mail and got a request from Profi-Lingua asking for a CV.

I did find an old thread in the archives (from 2009) which suggested Profi-Lingua was not the most reputable organisation to work for. Has anything changed?

Thanks :)

I do not have direct experience with the school myself, although some of my students who do have, have given them less-than-stellar reviews.

I noticed they have really taken to advertisement lately. Here in Poznań, on at least three different streets in the center of town, you can find people wearing Profi-Lingua shirts and handing out leaflets in an in-your-face way.

The above is Guerrilla marketing tactics, most large companies use exactly the same methods, therefore it should not be a sign of a bad or unprofessional organization.

In general, yes. They are still ruthless with teachers and think nothing of cutting salaries/hours if the business demands - but they are generally quite reputable with payments on time. It does seem to depend on the individual branch - as they're responsible for letting the head office know that the teachers must be paid.

I disclose - I worked for them last year on a few individual contracts with companies and had a pleasant experience with them. Salaries were cut across the board from the start of the last academic year, however.

If you don't have experience and qualifications, then it's not a bad place to start off :) Just make sure that you are very, very strict with payment.

Thanks for the replys.


Did the students rank them poorly because of bad teaching, bad coursework, both, or something else?


If I may ask, how much was the salary, even a 'ballpark' figure is fine if you don't want to disclose the actual amount :) How long were the contracts you got through them?

Thanks :)

In my case, it was all negotiated individually - so figures are useless for me because they don't reflect reality for normal workers there. The contracts were always for the duration of the semester - which was normally seen as 40 hours. I did go to 80zl an hour with them, but that was quite exceptional.

Anyway, for people working there, they could expect 40-50zl an hour. At the minute, I'd expect towards the lower end of that.

40 hours per week? I'm assuming that is what you mean.. otherwise 40 hours per semester isn't much :(

One student, over the course of six months, had three different tutors from them. Two of them returned to the UK and the third (at which point, my student left) kept using google on his laptop during lessons to answer basic grammatical questions. True, the fault is with the tutors, but the school should also stop hiring lemons. I also heard horror stories about another school in Poznań. Payment was in the form of a contract over one or two years (two years being the better deal, of course). Payments would be made monthly, but it turns out that the school would take credit from a bank for the full amount under their name using the contract and invoice the credit to the students.

It seems it's actually quite a challenge to find an honest, respectable school :) Language school owners seem to be quite ... specific characters.

Ah yes, the infamous Speak Up. Owned by the same company that owns Empik, and notorious for being very aggressive with sales. Strangely enough, if you ignore the horror stories about people signing credit agreements that they didn't know about (or read!) - the Poznan branch is actually quite well managed. I know two people who have worked there and were perfectly happy. I would hate it (the materials are all pre-prepared...) - but if you want something that gives you the ease of Callan combined with a job where your brain doesn't rot, it's not a bad place.


No - that was for corporate clients. For each client, I had a separate contract - because I was working as a pure freelancer and not under their normal system.Their normal contracts will be in/around 20-24 hours a week :)


Now you understand why I like my job ;)

Also, let's not forget that there is no screwing around. Most language schools are really reluctant to amend contracts with a little protection. Only two schools I've worked with have allowed a clause in the contract whereby, if my students were to cancel a lesson within 24 hours or (as has happened) they just don't show up, then I would still get paid. Frankly, getting a text message on the same day as your class, after you've prepared, saying "Sorry, I can't come today." and knowing you've lost time and money on it, is a **** take. I'm looking forward to knowing that my livelihood is at least a little bit secure and not at the mercy of whether somebody can be arsed to come for classes.

I worked for these creatures a few years ago until they cut pay. I don't remember anything about bank credit affecting teachers but


were appalling. I used to send corrected versions of their dreadful stuff (which was often adapted from coursebooks, but with special speak up errors included) every week to head office. They changed some stuff and left other handouts as they were. In fairness to students I used to point out the errors at the start of every class. Once I offered to check every piece of material for them. I said it would take me two weeks, working full time on it, and asked for a very reasonable amount to do it. No.

Tefl, most owners think the sun shines out of their posterior. Giving them suggestions - no matter how much it increases efficiency, productivity or authenticity, they will still see it as a personal attack.

There was one school here I had an epic-scale argument with over the design of a lesson record sheet. I changed the width of the table because it was out of my printer's printing range... I then had to argue through e-mail for about a week, listening to how they have designed these sheets based on years of professional experience and it will remain as it is. It's 'unprofessional' for one teacher to use a different style of sheet.

Profi-lingua in Szczecin is to be avoided like the plague...a local franchise run by an 'ambitious' lil' shithead. They'll offer you with a straight face a crappy contract which is vastly skewed toward protecting their interests while the teacher is left with lotsa burdens but zero guarantees of hours and/or continuity...after reading that 'so called' contract (umowa-zlecenie, i.e. the lowest of the shittiest in Poland) they were offering me, I couldn't gather myself to pick up my dog's droppings with it....fire did the deed just right though.