Is teaching English the best chance of securing employment in Poland?
After spending weeks looking on the net for office based positions in Warsaw, I have come to the conclusion that this may be the only option left.
Theoretically, I would have thought there would be a lot of international companies based in Warsaw, but getting access to this information seems hard.
Does anybody know of any agencies etc in Warsaw or contacts that may be able to help me?
I have read on this forum, that its who you know as well that helps.
You need to talk to the big international employers. I take it your Polish is not fluent so going through agencies may not be easy. All of the big accountancy firms have lots of offices in Poland. Many of the banks do too. If you have the right experience to get a job with them they may consider you for their Polish offices and may also stump up the cash for the language classes.
OK. I'm talking with the senior partner tomorrow so I'll put out the feelers for you. I think getting an office manager job with them might be impossible because I know the incumbent in Warsaw and trust me she is very good and very well respected. He does know an awful lot of clients though !
Had a chat as promised. No openings in that particular firm but he thinks he knows a couple of clients who might have some vacancies. I can't put much pressure on him timewise but if I don't hear within a week I'll give hime a call.
See my other post relating to documents i can send anyone re working and living in Poland sent by a EURES advisor on behalf of the Jobcentre Plus International Team :)
i work in Poland being from the netherlands and i dont give language lessons . there is a serious shortage on technical disciplines and its relative easy to find a job even not speaking polish . last half year i work in electronics even without all to much polish . but keep in mind learning polish is very much needed cause not all poles speak german or english . anyway good luck i love living here poland rules !
Is teaching English the best chance of securing employment in Poland?
No, there is increasing employment from BPO companies. This are companies who are oursourcing their business processes to Poland, mostly from the USA and Western Europe. If you like to work for such a company you can contact any recruitment agency in any large town in Poland
Contact the British Polish chamber of commerce and get a list of their members and send out your CV. ALSO contact the American Polish chamber of Commerce. It will be difficult at arms length and you ill have more success when you are on the ground here in Poland. I also know of some expats who work for film companies as english speaking actors and they will get 600-1000 plz a day. They have no previous acting experience they just signed up with an agency.
Not sure specifically about Poland, but I know that up until the mid-'90's, many countries were looking desperately for educated English native-speaker teachers as instructors. The reasons of course were that all pupils were typically subjected to years of mind-numbing classroom rote rot from non-native teachers and rarely if ever heard native US-English as taught by anyone other than Europeans who'd studied in the UK, yet often had such second-language interference, it was a surprise that the children learned correct, idiomatically natural English at all!
With the advent of the digital age over the past decade or so, English has become almost as though it were the first "second" language of the entire European continent, Poland being no exception.
When I taught English briefly in Germany, I was usually the first native English speaker most had ever encountered. As a result, many had to unlearn the mistakes handed down to them by their native German-born and educated English teachers:-)
Although I teach English myself I know quite a few non Polish speaking foreigners who have other jobs. I would concentrate on Warsaw or some of the other larger cities however.
Nowadays it's polarised. There are either (not really in Poland) the well-paying jobs (usually connected to petrochemicals companies or universities in more affluent countries) where you need to be able to create a syllabus with structures and lexis appropriate to the learners' levels, degree of educational attainment, personal situation and learning aims, create the threads and understand how to develop them and follow the syllabus you wrote without depending on textbooks and with the learners prepared adequately for any public examinations they're taking. Or there's a sort of race to the bottom in for example Spain or sadly now Poland.
I've even heard of lessons for less than 60 an hour now in Warsaw and some providers are now employing 'Teachers' without any sort of teaching qualification or even a degree! Ones who are doing English lessons of whatever quality because they're in the country rather than being in the country in order to teach there. That or some sort of hokey 'dual method' where a local presents the core syllabus and the native speaker does God knows what.
Many of the professional Teachers I worked with when I first came to Warsaw are still in the country having settled permanently there however very few are still teaching unless it's private lessons on top of their regular job. Most of those people speak Polish nicely and get the private lessons through personal recommendation. They tend to refuse more students than they take.
There are other jobs for English speakers in PL; in fact more and more. Monolinguals are at a disadvantage though, and unfortunately some of the jobs are at call centres etc.
There's online work, however this is of varying quality and not always stable employment.
Has anything changed for the better for foreigners who are native English speakers when it comes to possible employment in Poland? These days, the young generation of Poles know English well enough to communicate and they probably don't need much more in an employment setting. They can translate written text online into perfect English too.
Possibly some other skill than just language proficiency is needed. I'm not sure if learning Polish would be the best way of spending your time as you'd never be good at it unless you spend a decade learning it...
In a work setting within Europe or Asia among other non-native, English second language speakers I'd agree! It's sort of like the blind leading the blind really. A Norwegian manager in Poland for a conference spearheaded by a German, organized by a French team, won't actually need to know "English", as in reality, the international language will be some quasi-dialect of "Globish", bearing little resemblance to the language which authentic North American, even British English speakers recognize as their native tongue.
As ESL-instructors, we struggle constantly to strike a professional balance, although often the following is what comes out during classroom interchanges with speakers from any of the above countries, all assembled in the same room:
Odd: Yeah, back in the day, yeah, I didn't never had many experience with so much foreigners like in Oslo.
Daniel: Totally! In Germany, yeah, it is like so heavy for manager to maintained a control above the workers in my department. They speak not often German at the work, even not in English...
Witold: Not really, but in Warsaw, Polish is like language for genius people, so stupid to fxxxking learn Polish language, because we all talk, like, in English all day...
Having to run interference, so to speak, it next to impossible, much less correct, the myriad mistakes and vulgarities which pepper their English in the belief that it somehow makes them sound "cool" LOL
you'd never be good at it unless you spend a decade learning it...
You don't need to be fluent but you do need to have at least basic Polish. If you live in Poland you won't just be mixing with younger people (and although they learn English in school nowadays, very few are confident about using it in everyday life). You will encounter many people who don't speak any English at all so some knowledge of Polish is essential. Apart from that all Polish people appreciate the fact that you've made some effort to learn the language and if you still don't speak more than a couple of words after years of living in the country, it's not well received, as you can imagine.
I think many people, especially those who live in the EU which allows to work and travel in many multi-lingual countries in Europe, don't really know if they are going to stay in Poland. They go there, live for a month or so, and then when they like it, they may start looking for a job. But they always keep in mind that they can go back to their native country not to deal with the new reality which is not as rosy as during the fascination period. There are many international couples who live in Poland only for the sake of their family.
Learning a foreign language, especially as difficult as Polish, is not for everyone. Sure, you can and should learn the basics, but it's not going to make any dent in your professional life where you'd be forced to only communicate (or via translation) in your native language.
English should be mandatory everywhere. In a couple of generations, English should replace all others. The Internet would be a good starting point with an English-only rule. Just like here...
North Koreans working in Poland do not speak Polish and, usually, not English either. Interestingly, if they knew Polish, they would not be allowed to work in Poland.
Rich, Europeans simply have to get used to the fact that they are practicing their English, much as native Anglophones are practicing their foreign language skills abroad!
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