How long will it take me to find a job after the TEFL course?

The short answer is: it depends on you!

If you are proactive, motivated and do the legwork you’ll pick up a job in one or two weeks after the course. It’s not unknown for people to start looking for work halfway through the course and go into full-time employment immediately after they graduate (Editor’s note: I personally wouldn’t recommend this, the course is quite intensive and you’ll want a little time to gather your thoughts once you finish!)

You should manage your expectations when looking for a job; it’s certainly possible and common to pick up full-time hours (16-20) in an academy straight after the course, but it’s equally common to build up your timetable slowly, working for a couple of different schools. If you look at job adverts on www.lingobongo.com for example, you’ll see many schools offering blocks of hours.

English classes in Spain tend to fall into either Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday slots, so you might find an advert for Mondays and Wednesdays from 5pm-9pm, for example. That’s half a timetable, but you’ll also find other schools looking for e.g. Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4pm-7pm.

You can fill in any gaps in your timetable with private classes, and over the course of one month you’ll build up to a full teaching timetable. It’s simply a case of starting small and building up, which is to be expected as you’re new to the teaching profession!

Final note: no TEFL course can guarantee you a job and you have to put in the effort to find one. A job won’t fall into your lap so you have to send out your CV and actively respond to job adverts. That said, there is a lot of teaching work available in Barcelona so if you look for a job it’s very likely you’ll find one relatively quickly.

If you have any questions about teaching and working in Barcelona feel free to contact us.