Pros
Support in Finding Accommodation: During the three-week orientation period at the hostel, Chatteris assists you in the rather daunting task of finding an apartment in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. They provide you with a helpful flat-hunting guidebook and will send past employees and Cantonese-speaking volunteers with you on your flat hunt. They tend to push everyone into living in Central Kowloon, though, which is a very densely populated blue-collar district that even the locals refer to as “the dark side” of Hong Kong. I wish I had done more research before I signed a lease there but I appreciated the company’s help throughout the process.
Visa Support: Other reviewers have noted that working for Chatteris will provide you with a work visa to live and work in Hong Kong for about 10 months (permitting that you don’t break your contract with them). While this is true, Chatteris shouldn’t really be merited for doing the bare legal minimum for its international employees. If your goal in applying to Chatteris is merely to get a work visa in Hong Kong, then explore other ways of doing so.
Payment is Timely and Regular: I’m really grasping at straws now, but I thought I’d mention that payment is on time because I’ve heard of instances in comparable teach-english-abroad programs where payment is irregular. With Chatteris, you will always get your little pay slip at the end of each month.
Cons
Unprofessionalism: Chatteris is an unprofessional company because the management has a high turnover rate and thus consists of inexperienced people each year who are largely unqualified to do the very thing the company purports do to; that is, teach English to Hong Kong students. During your orientation, you won’t receive adequate training in lesson planning, classroom management, how to cater to students with different English levels and learning abilities, or even basic information about how the Hong Kong school system differs from that of your home country. This is a problem because you will likely be a recent college graduate who has little teaching experience of your own to draw from when you encounter difficulties in your school placement. If you do have a difficult school placement, the only support you’ll receive will come in the form of a well meaning but inexperienced “project manager” sent to observe you at school, who is probably the same age as you or younger, and whose teaching advice will be something along the lines of “just wing it.”
Blatant Disinterest in Educating HK Students: Since the company can’t be bothered to hire people with much teaching experience to train and support its employees, you can be sure that your role in your school will have very little to do with educating or teaching students. Instead, your job has much more to do with self-promotion and public relations. Many schools in Hong Kong receive funding from the government to pay for native-English speaking foreigners to work for them, without much regard to whether the foreigners are qualified teachers or if they are meaningfully employed in the school. Having a foreigner at hand increases the school’s image (which also increases government funding) and appeases parents’ concerns about their children’s economically advantageous English education. As a Chatteris employee, you will be a pawn to these political forces that you won’t understand. You won’t be expected to do any meaningful teaching, but you will be a valuable public relations tool for your school. You will be asked to speak at morning assemblies, to show up at weekend functions just so parents can see you interacting with their children, and to commodify your entire home culture into easily digestible workshops that can be slapped together for your school’s requisite English Day activities or Parent-Teacher Nights. All of this might not bother you, and you might prefer it to actual teaching, but it could also be intellectually crushing if you care about things like true knowledge and learning. Either way, be forewarned.
Patronizing Policies and Obsession with Résumé Building: Chatteris only hires recent or near-recent college graduates and they will take advantage of this fact by using it to justify many of their patronizing policies. They will try to foist work that its office staff is perfectly capable of doing onto you by hinting that it would look great on your presumably sparse resume. Menial marketing jobs, management courses, referral schemes, and fundraising commitments will all be offloaded onto you under the pretense that it will help you more than it will help the company. You literally will not get an email from Chatteris that does not refer to the wonders that doing extra work for them will do for your resume or CV. Your arm will also be twisted into going to many extracurricular activities hosted by Chatteris because you will be told that not doing so will affect your performance evaluations. Of course it is nice that Chatteris organizes social events for their employees, but it is very condescending to be told that your attendance of these events is being evaluated when in reality your social preferences have no bearing on your work performance or capabilities.
Inconsistent Workload Distribution: Another big problem with the company is the uneven work distribution across schools. It is a well-known fact within the company that people in the post-secondary program do the least amount of work, while the workload in the primary and secondary programs vastly differs depending on the school. Chatteris will of course act like it is helpless in the face of this problem, when setting more clear guidelines and boundaries about our roles in the schools would do a lot to solve the problem of schools over and under-using us. Anyway, it might actually be better if you are in one of the schools that have an unreasonably heavy workload. Even though it will be frustrating to see your friends earn the same amount of money as you while essentially doing nothing more than catching up on their Netflix queues at work, at least you will have contributed, however slightly, to your school.
