🥶 For those more familiar with working in international teaching, they know that the peak time to secure a job overseas is from December-February. By the time March rolls around, which is usually when schools in America start asking their employees about whether or not they are returning to work that next school year, international schools are wrapping up their recruitment. This earlier time frame has a lot to do with the time it takes for work visas to be secured and for new employees to settle their business at the current location in order to make the move to the next location. Should you find yourself still without a job abroad by March, no need to fret. For some choice schools, their recruitment season is just getting started while others might be dealing with the inevitable last minute vacancies from current staff or sudden cold feet from new recruits. It seems that it is never too late to secure your dream job overseas; in fact, I have acquired several of my favorite contracts as late as as March and even a European contract in July.

If you are like me and you still are looking for that ideal match between you and an international school, there are still several options to keep the job hunt strong:

• Continue utilizing the international teaching agencies where new job posts are still showing up weekly (not exactly daily though, as before).
• Broaden the net and sign-up for different online agencies that might just be advertising a job you haven’t seen before.
• Consider attending the few late-in-season job fairs.
• Start searching LinkedIn or even job boards for locals in the countries that interest you most. Some of the smaller schools tend to post in regions, though they will consider applicants from overseas.
• Share your job search status with people in your network; people are always hearing about new vacancies that pop up, but don’t always last long enough to make it onto the online job boards.
• Make the direct approach to schools you really have an interest in. Timing is everything and your application might be reaching their HR department at the same time as someone’s resignation.

🦄 I share all of these options with you not to lull you into some kind of false hope. Anyone that knows me personally will tell you that though I am a fan of rainbows and unicorns in the fantasy fiction I read, my day to day life is strictly evaluated from a staunch realist’s perspective. There is no sugar-coating in my world after the kinds of things I have seen and experienced, but the fact that I have truly performed the steps listed above and experienced joyful success afterwards that causes me to recommend them to you.

🤷‍♀️ Allow me to share a few of my successes with you in the hope that you will feel inspired enough to persevere on your own job hunt journey. I will start with my most recent experiences, since they are the easiest to remember as I do claim to be the “as old as dirt international educator” after all. Just yesterday, as I attended an eleven hour robotics tournament with my students, I ended up going online to ISS.edu and GRCfair.org – primarily because their application process only requires me to click a few buttons like “Apply” for the GRC agency and one extra step of “Attach Saved Draft of Cover Letter” for the ISS agency – and I applied to several vacancies that interested me. By the time I awoke this morning, I had several interview requests in my mailbox, and I have already lined up interviews for later this week. In addition, I am considering a few positions that have ended up in my LinkedIn mailbox based on schools reading my posts or seeing that I am available to work; who knew that waiting until later in the recruitment season leads to schools coming directly to you instead of you having to hunt them out all the time? We shall see how successful these actions end up being, but for now they are a fabulous distraction from the fact that the school I am most eager to hear from hasn’t yet made me an offer and I have never been one to sit around and wait.

🌈 Some past successes also keep me from despairing. For example, I have received so much rejection in past attempts to find jobs that even my attendance at in-person job fairs, multiple interviews online, and even colleague connections had me jobless and feeling desperate in March. However, once I decided to go consider other online job boards, such as TIEonline.com, and I started sharing my concerns with colleagues, people started telling me about how their friends in other countries knew of vacancies I could apply for, and so I did and I landed that job in Venezuela. Sometimes you need those personal recommendations for the school to catch your eye and for you to catch theirs. Because I have been teaching for a while, another perk I benefit from is having former bosses reaching out when they have a last minute vacancies to see if I would be interested; because they are familiar with my flexibility and willingness to pivot quickly, taking the chance on me eventually led me back to Africa. Living in the Netherlands is a goal I have had since I was in grade school since my mum immigrated from there, and to help make this happen, I have researched many international schools there that I now follow on social media and I apply to regularly via local Dutch job boards, LinkedIn posts, and bigger international teaching agencies. A few times, I have come close to landing a job there this way, though it always seems the opportunities occur only right after I have signed another contract. Depending on how this recruitment season goes, I may try to attend a late-in-season job fair, though the one I did years ago online only convinced me to remain in America another year as my gig was too good to give up at the time.

⚾ So, if the negative self-talk or the discouragement you get from others begins to weigh you down and to make you lose hope, just imagine how awesome it would feel to actually land that dream job and to tell all those nay-sayers, “See ya!” I know how incredible that feeling is because I have been in the “last-picked to play ball” category almost my entire life, but the reality is that there are enough games out there being played that some team out there is going to need you just as much as you need them, and that is what will lead to your ultimate success. Teaching is that kind of profession that truly does have something for everyone, you just have to be willing to go up to bat.