I know, I know. You've all been refreshing your browser windows every 30 minutes to see if I've updated my bolg. At least those of you who are still reading.
Well, I've been pretty busy. I don't know if I've mentioned it yet, but that job that I thought I had, well, I don't. I'm too young. Apparently, some schools set an arbitrary age limit, under or over which they are reluctant to hire even qualified teachers. So these last two weeks I've been applying to everything I see. The result of this is that I've had 6 interviews in the last week, and I have at least 5 more next week. The exciting thing is that there are some pretty neat jobs in this bunch, including some non-teaching positions.
First, I have been applying to some ALT positions, kind of like what I've been doing for the last year, except for private schools, which pay much better. Generally $2800 to $3500 a month. Most public school positions pay $2200 or less, averaged over 12 months.
The next step up is a position as the head teacher for a small foreign language college. The current head teacher is really trying to sell me to the management, but he's concerned that my age (again, too young) will be a setback in terms of the management's ideals. If I don't get full time with them, I should get part time, paying about as much as my full-time position did.
The most exciting for me potentally, are two interview I have set up, one Saturday, and one Monday, which are not teaching positions. The first is for what I guess would be a DotCom, which has a variety of online business, mostly to english education, as a sales person. I don't know much about the position itself, but it doesn't include teaching.
The second is a result of a tip that my friend Sunny gave me. She was an exchange student from Korea at Asia University, the school that I studied at 4 years ago. She currently has a job working with Korean trading company in Tokyo, which she found by using the government employment agency. Yep! The unemployment office! There is actually one in Tokyo that is specifically for foreign residents. I was a little apprehensive at first. I'm not too confident in my Japanese skills, and the information on the web said it was for foreign residents of Japanese ancestry. But I decided to check it out (Since Sunny doesn't have Japanese ancestry) and found that they are really quite good.
After a quick registration, I sat down with an employment councilor and an english translator, and they asked me some question, mostly in Japanese about what I wanted to do and about my work history. After that, they searched through a huge database of employment requests sent in by companies. We picked out about 7 or 8 of them, looked them over more throughly and called two of them. One manager asked to talk directly to me, and in Japanese, he told me a little about the position and asked about my computer background. Mostly he was concerned that I understood Japanese and Unix. I have done some tinkering with Linux, and Mac OS, beneath the surface is basically a kind of Unix, so I think he was satisfied enough to schedule an interview for Monday. The other one we called, didn't want to talk to me. They just wanted me to write a Japanese resume and send it to them so they could check my Japanese ability that way.
Some other jobs that we found were sales positions, and a position at a real-estate company that works with foreign residents finding monthly apartments and stuff, which could be interesting.
So I have a full schedule of interview, plus my third attempt at the drivers test next week. Don't stop reading!
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