Interac Reviews

-Less pay/benefits compared to JET but if you could get into JET you wouldn't be here anyways. -You're experience will vary wildly depending on where you're placed/what school you get. You can get a school that expects you to walk in and do a 50 minute lesson the first day or a school that never expects you do do a lesson at all and just kind of assist the teacher with having kids repeat stuff in English, maybe play some warm-up games, it all depends on where you end up. Some schools are really into using ALTs some are much less so -Months with lots of time off have partial pay (the specifics are on the website) -There's about 2 weeks of training, but it's kind of up to you to figure out how to be a teacher -In my opinion this is not a long-term position, there are people who stay in it for a long time but there's no advancement you'll basically be in the same job at the same pay forever, but you can definitely take the job and look for better jobs throughout your year with interac, many places only hire people already in Japan -Supposedly they are into this dumb tearing you down and building you up mentality when it comes to training, my training only had a tiny bit of that element, but I've hear from people who had pretty bad training experiences particularly in Tokyo. -This is not a job for people looking to be like English teaching professor legends it's a job for people who want to goof around with Japanese kids and try to make their English class more fun while getting to experience living in Japan, I put this as a con because some people go in thinking they are going to be doing a lot more serious teaching than they are. -Co-workers who are bad with money and living way above their means complaining -Interac has to tell you to follow rules that nobody actually follows like no team teaching in certain areas which I did all year both years all the time mostly -Japanese schools are seriously lacking in ways to discipline their kids because they can't suspend them. That means if you get an awful kid everybody wants to strangle they can't kick him/her out, although you can talk to interac/the teachers you work with if there's a problem life a kid being rude to you a lot and they may be able to help out a lot with that.

- My biggest gripe with this company is that they didn’t get me the medical help I needed when I needed it. I was severely sick in Japan almost immediately when I got there, and Interac brushed off my worries. My sickness was on and off for about 4 months before they finally decided I needed to be sent to the hospital because I had missed too many days at work. It turns out I had tonsillitis, and if they hadn’t caught it, I would’ve had to have surgery. They didn’t seem to care about my health until I started not being able to go to work. That is what bugged me the most and was one of the main reasons I left. - Undue stress on their employees. My BOE didn’t understand that I had missed so many days because of Interac’s neglect to help me get to a hospital and diagnose what was going on with me, so they got upset. Several times, some of the managers and staff would ask to meet me in my town, and then basically tell me to suck it up, because they were going to lose the contract with that town. I had all intentions to finish my contract and I did successfully, but I became sick from the stress and had to hide it because I didn’t want to upset Interac or the BOE. - Poor communication/not knowing who to communicate information to. - Staff that didn’t know what they were doing/saying. I had trouble with being made to pay double pension when I first arrived and it took them 1 - 2 months to resolve that. There were also several instances where they told me one thing and the opposite ended up happening. - The pay was not the best. Livable, but it doesn’t really allow for anything else besides rent, bills, and food. I would really not recommend this company to anyone.