How to start out..?

[bailefionn]

Hi there im a 20 year old student who will graduate in may from a business degree in Ireland. Im really interested in the idea of TEFL and was wondering how to go about it all. The idea of working somewhere in South America interests me and was wondering if you have any advice or thoughts on that choice..

Secondly im not sure about how to go about acheiving this certificate. If i do the course online or in person in ireland is it recogniseed worldwide?

Lastly Do you know if its hard to gain employment after completing the course..

I know thats a lot of questions but im really new to this idea but extremely interested and excited by the prospect of it all. Any help at all would be gretaly appreciated.. :)

[Tyson]

I have been doing a lot of research on this myself lately, and so far I have found out If your going to do an online course make sure its 120 hours, and make sure it requires at least 6 hours of actual teaching EFL, usually it will require you go to a local ESL school and volunteer for six hours, these schools would usually be more than happy to help.

There are also a lot of online programs that will have a weekend onsite training after the online portion, as far as I know there are a lot more TEFL schools in Europe than Canada so it shouldn't be a problem finding
one.
If you dont want to do an online course most of these schools will offer a 4 week course at the school to get certified for TEFL.

Whatever you decide to do just make sure it is a program that will be recognized worldwide.

After you get certified all you need to do is start looking for work, theres lots of great sites with loads of TEFL jobs world wide, just google tefl jobs.

http://www.tefl.com/jobs/search.html

http://www.languagelink.co.uk/

The best thing to do if you really are interested is probably to get in touch with some language schools that are hiring and find out what they really look for.

Hope this helps.

cheers