Founder Radu Olanson and job placement manager Rowan Lomas on how the company started, what makes a strong TEFL provider, and where teachers are finding work today
Oxford Seminars is nearly 35 years in business, and founder and CEO Radu Olanson still calls himself employee number one. In an interview with job placement manager Rowan Lomas, who joined the company in 2010, Olanson talked about the company’s unusual origins, accreditation principles and curriculum, and what he believes separates a real TEFL qualification from an empty one.
Origins
Q (Radu): Can you tell the story of how Oxford Seminars began?
A: I’m the founder and CEO, employee number one. It started with the LSAT (Law School Admission Test). I wrote that when I was an undergraduate and had thoughts of law school. At that time, I scored 98th percentile, and friends said they would have sold organs for that score. I was really thinking of becoming a lawyer and decided against it at that point, but I’d already built a course to help people do better on the LSAT, and that’s what I did. We took on the GMAT the following year and then the MCAT.
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Q (Radu): So how did the TEFL side begin?
A: My first employee, Lisa, was going to teach ESL in South Korea with her then-fiancé. She did a training session for me and her teaching skills were terrible — that was when I realized there was an immediate need to train people before they went abroad to work. That is how we began our first TESOL, TESL and TEFL certification course. I didn’t teach it myself; I hired our first instructor and gave them so much freedom in the curriculum. Thirty years ago, the industry standard was 60 hours. Now it’s 120, and that’s what we operate today. We started in Ontario, expanded across Canada, then followed in the direction of a competitor in the US — they didn’t do well at expanding, and we haven’t.
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Who takes the course
Q (Radu): How would you describe your ideal student?
A: We see three broad categories. In the first is somebody who never had many options at home — one grad described going from a university dropout working 70 hours a week in Canada to a respected professional in Kyrgyzstan with a career in international education, rising up the socioeconomic ladder while lowering his tax rate. The second is a university graduate entering a tough job market, who went from sleeping on a friend’s couch and sending 30 resumes a week to teaching at a top international school in Shanghai; it took years of building experience first.
The third is a mid-career person looking for a change, a former marketing executive who took our course in 2015, built a life and a career in Thailand and now has been promoted to head teacher over nine other staff. We’ve had people in their 60s take the course, retired school principals, even 18-year-olds, which is our minimum age.
Job placement
Q (Rowan): What’s involved in your job placement service?
A: I started as a job placement advisor in 2010, so almost 16 years now. As soon as students finish the live part of the course they get access to job placement. They pick countries they want to teach in, they submit a draft resume and cover letter for review, and once they have that, we present their application to employers in over 30 countries worldwide which we are in touch with. We also assist with interview preparation and contract review post-graduation, and we keep up with grads after the first placement too. Most grads come back for second, third and even sixth placements as they move between countries.
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Q (Rowan): Which countries are currently in the strongest demand right now?
A: The top markets remain pretty much the same year over year: Korea, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Japan. Mexico is still very much in demand, and Colombia has emerged as a top market too. Spain and Italy are still the top countries in Europe. Vietnam has been rising but has become a bit more difficult in recent years compared to before.
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Q (Rowan): Is teaching ESL abroad still a great option with the economy looking the way it is right now?
A: Absolutely. It’s a great option for people looking for a change, or fresh graduates looking to start a career somewhere. Honestly, it’s probably easier to get a job teaching English abroad right now than to get a job in your own field back home. People in jobs are afraid to leave them because they’re worried they won’t find something new, but there are schools abroad constantly looking for teachers. In my 16 years in job placement it’s never been very difficult, aside from the early pandemic due to travel restrictions.
Curriculum and accreditation
Q (Radu): What is your course of study?
A: We offer a standard class, currently 120 hours long. Students get to know what it’s like to be an ESL teacher from day one: warm-up games, exercises and icebreaker activities which they will carry with them to their own students. We cover classroom management, lesson planning, team teaching, and teaching at all ages and levels of proficiency: writing, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, speaking, listening, reading, and testing and evaluation. The first half happens over three weekends in person, and the second half is a 60-hour online component students take within up to 105 days, a lot of which is grammar.
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Most people don’t even know why they’d need that until they’re the one being asked by a student why we say ‘an interesting little book’ instead of ‘a little interesting book’ — you need to be able to describe it in grammatical terms, not just say it sounds right. We’ve been told by school directors abroad that our grads are much better at teaching and presenting English grammar compared to other first-time teachers, and I know grammar is part of that.
Q (Radu): What would you tell someone who is trying to decide between TEFL course providers?
A: I’d say there are a few basic questions to ask every provider.
Does the course:
- Offer interactive ESL teaching skills from day one — warm-up games, icebreakers, exercises?
- Cater to cultural sensitivity, since anyone living and working abroad eventually faces some culture shock and needs to know how to work through it?
- Cover up-to-date educational theory, even briefly, alongside the practical skills?
- Provide genuine ESL teaching resources? Is the certification comprehensive — covering TESOL, TESL and TEFL so you can teach anywhere in the world, since different regions use different terms for the same thing?
- And critically: does it include real job placement, not just three words on a page saying ‘lifetime job assistance’ that turns out to mean a reference letter and a list of five or ten job websites. Beyond that, check the program’s reputation with employers directly — are there more schools looking to hire its graduates than it has students? — and check how long the provider has actually been running. Some of these courses set up shop and disappear a couple of years later. We’ve been around more than 34 years.
Q (Radu): Do you offer anything beyond the standard course?
A: Yes — 40-hour specialization modules for teaching English online, teaching business English, which is the single biggest area of demand for specialized tutoring abroad, and teaching English to young learners. There’s also TOEFL and IELTS test preparation, which I wouldn’t recommend for a first-time teacher, but it’s the most popular module among our more experienced grads. Only around 15 to 20 percent of our graduates take one of these modules, but they can make a real difference — one of our grads took four of them over the years while doing missionary and teaching work in Mongolia, South Korea and now Japan.
Who’s teaching now
Q (Rowan): Are you seeing more retirees or career changers taking the course these days?
A: The demographics have changed a lot. When I started, most of our graduates were straight out of university, in their 20s or 30s. Now our average age has climbed into the 40s, and many of our grads are mid-career changers or retirees in their 60s and 70s, looking to work somewhere warmer than a Canadian or northern U.S. winter.
Quickfire
Q (Rowan): What is the most underrated teaching skill?
A: Positive reinforcement. Be honest about the good things your students do and don’t focus only on the bad ones — that makes school somewhere they want to come to learn.
Q (Rowan): What is the most common myth about TEFL?
A: That it’s just a paid vacation. It’s not, because employers expect real commitment to professional teaching: showing up on time, not hungover.
Q (Rowan): What’s the best country for first-time teachers?
A: Two, really. Thailand, because there is so much demand and contracts are so short-term that you’re almost guaranteed a job even if you don’t like it the most. Or Korea, if you have to save money — there’s a lot of free apartments and airfare support. I taught in Korea right out of university and paid off my student loans quickly, putting about $1,000 a month toward them.
Q (Rowan): What is one book every English teacher should read?
A: The Betty Azar grammar series. It’s not light reading, but a lot of experienced teachers swear by it — students can be real grammar nerds, and it helps when they ask you a question you don’t know the answer to.
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Q (Rowan): What is one classroom habit every teacher needs to develop?
A: Always be prompt; be on time in the classroom. And be thoughtful: after every class, reflect on what worked and what didn’t, and how you’d do things differently next time.
Q (Rowan): What are some things every new teacher should avoid?
A: Don’t be friends with your students — be friendly, but know that you’re the authority. Get too friendly and your students will take advantage of it.
Q (Radu): If you could only recall one thing from this conversation, what is it?
A: The number one thing I hear from our grads is ‘I should have done this years ago.’ My response always is: don’t beat yourself up, you’re doing it now, think about everyone back home who never got the chance. The other thing I’d point out is one-on-one tutoring — it’s lucrative, but more importantly it makes you a better teacher. In an 8, 12, or 20-student class you don’t always know what’s working. Tutoring one-on-one shows you what does, and you can take that right into the classroom.
Oxford Seminars provided a few of the graduate testimonials mentioned in this conversation, which are paraphrased here for length.
Some contributors to this article have a commercial relationship with EFL Magazine. The article is independently produced and remains under the editorial control of EFL Magazine.
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