Unemployable, That’s What I Am

Stephen Reilly Jr, UK

Stephen Reilly Jr now works as a CELTA trainer and mentors Gazan students seeking scholarships in Europe. He’s also recently qualified as a swimming pool lifeguard but he encourages everyone around him to learn how to swim. He’s more comfortable at a whiteboard wearing a blue jacket and holding a marker than in a swimming pool with a yellow t-shirt and blowing a whistle.

Summary

Stephen reflects on a year-long period looking for paid work during which he realised that recruiters aren’t to blame for not giving him any. Indeed, if any employer reads this article, Stephen might still be looking for a while yet. Nonetheless, he evokes the bigger blunders he’s made in his research so that other desperate fast-ageing unemployed teachers don’t repeat them.

Now and then

After ten years teaching in Paris and five in Cairo, I find myself back on a once-familiar but now barely-recognisable job market. Back at the turn of the millennium, with my CELTA in hand, finding jobs entailed making a phone call to a receptionist in a language school, who asked nothing beyond ‘When’s the soonest you can start?’ Even the recruitment panel of the British Council Paris, a YL teaching centre where I worked for ten years, struggled to contain their desperation when interviewing me.

‘You’ve taught YLs before, haven’t you, Stephen?’

‘Naw, no really.’

‘But you’re willing to learn, aren’t you?’

‘Aye, I’ll learn anything.’

‘Could you please start this Monday, please?’

And once I got a foothold there, job interviews even for the elite universities of Paris, consisted merely of a tour of the premises and an induction.

But the market of jobs today? Despite hearing repeated warnings, I still wasn’t ready for its new stands and stalls: online interviews, scrutiny of social media profiles, likes and posts, LinkedIn, competitive candidates world-wide, AI summaries of Zoom interviews, recorded demo lessons, a two-minute home video of explaining the present perfect in a suit and tie, and then, the most enraging of all, employer ghosting. In total: six months of searching, a near century of job applications, and a dozen interviews. The result? Four job offers, a dozen rejection letters and ghostings for the remainder.

So where have I gone wrong? Today, a job application is sent through school portals, companies’ websites, Google Docs or LinkedIn before disappearing and, just like a message in a bottle, we don’t know its journey or destination. Occasionally invitations bobble back to my inbox, but then post-interview the few employers who bother to send rejection emails offer no individual feedback. In short, I don’t know.

That said, I can guess. Thanks to 20:20 hindsight vision along with feedback from family, friends and ex-colleagues, I've compiled below a non-exhaustive list of gaffes, blunders and misguided beliefs made over the course of my job search. Some readers might nod in recognition although most will shake their heads in disbelief and ask ‘Did he really do that?’ In truth, I did worse and thanks to omissions and embellishments I like to think that I’ve succeeded in portraying myself in a rather flattering light.

Assume your background suffices and you’ve nothing to prove

With a CELTA, Delta, BA (Hons) and MA in Translation and Linguistics, I’d imagined that a mere glimpse of my CV would grant me an immediate interview, which would consist merely of bagging an exorbitant salary, reduced working week and extended holidays. The reality, however, is that fifty-plus-year-olds like me are less likely to be employed than those in a younger age bracket. Secondly, candidates of my age are more commonly found in management or training than in a classroom and my applications for a simple teaching position might arouse surprise not to say suspicion. Lastly, we teachers now compete not only against fellow teachers for work but AI chatbots too. Nothing to prove? Actually, I had everything to prove.

Believe that on a CV more is more

I had detailed on my CV all my employers going back to 1981 when I began working as a door-to-door sweet seller aged 12 then followed by my summer job as a rubbish collector and grass cutter aged 16. That, combined with a list of the dozen language schools I’d worked for, would prove my versatility, demonstrate how relatable I am to students from all walks of life and amuse the recruiters. Instead, it showed that I highlight irrelevant details, that I’m a dilettante and that I was born in a decade so far gone that it’s now described in the interviewers’ school history books.

Offer career advice to the interviewers

During a pre-interview small-talk phase, I commented on the biographies of the panel members posted on the teaching centre’s website to show how I’d researched their company and shown an interest in them. I then followed up with one member: ‘So how come you didn’t finish your Delta?’ I don’t remember his answer but I do remember my follow-up advice: ‘You should finish it, really. It’s not difficult. I mean if I can get it, any clown can.’ ‘Maybe’, he must have thought, ‘but clown me has a job. Clown you will now perform elsewhere.’

Denigrate the panel’s IT skills

On a Zoom encounter, panel members were present but only one spoke and none had switched on their cameras. So my screen was all black with names I could barely decipher and, with only one voice audible, the interview resembled a spooky play. ‘Aren’t your cameras working?’ I asked the creaky male voice, ‘and don’t they know how to unmute?’ referring to the other black squares on my screen. ‘They’re here as observers’ he intoned, ‘and it’s me who runs the show.’ He was and after the interview they all did a vanishing act.

Show impatience with a two-interview process

I sat through an online interview for a 40-hour-week minimum-wage entry-level teaching position in an internationally renowned franchise with a single interviewer who interrogated me on every subject in the Encyclopedia Britannica. At the end she announced that I had passed the first interview and that we would move on at a later date to the second ‘teaching-based’ one. ‘There’ll be a second interview for this?’ I spat out of my downturned mouth. In the end she decided that one interview with me had already been one too many.

Tell the truth

Interview questions have been easy (How do you deal with disruptive behaviour?), original (How would you improve by half a CEFR level our entire university campus of students?), challenging (Describe a cross-cultural problem that you’ve resolved) and pleasant (What is your proudest moment as a teacher? Getting a student’s in-class creative writing exercise published in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine; see references below). But in my sole face-to-face interview I got caught napping by the most tedious, intrusive and treacherous question of all: ‘What are your weaknesses?’ I sat gap-mouthed remembering that I couldn’t be bothered thinking up any characteristic that’s harmless, charming and transformable into a strength. My only resort was to tell the truth: ‘I’m petty, unforgiving, vengeful, moody, uncommunicative and thin-skinned for starters, and primary school boys have accused me—rightly so—of favouring girls. Also, my colleagues commented, even if I don't always agree, that I’m non-conformist, edgy and subversive.’ The interviewers glanced at each other, formulated a couple more round-up questions then accompanied me to the door and, with outstretched pinkies and thumbs pressed against their ears, said together ‘We’ll call you.’

Demote the role of technology

With idle hours to pass, I’d spent summer mornings in a cafe reading Neil Postman, that infamous revolutionary and technology-resistant educator, co-author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Postman is famous for warning us against the danger of ‘amusing ourselves to death’, for opposing the use of personal computers in schools and for arguing that ‘the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit’. As I turned the pages, he fast became my new all-time favourite educator and my next interview couldn’t come quickly enough so that I could name-drop him, quote his books and shame any panellist who hadn’t read him.

‘Do you use technology in class, Stephen?’ I was duly asked. ‘Only sparingly’ I stated. ‘I always question whether a device facilitates learning. If it doesn’t, I don’t.’

‘Can you explain further?’

‘Well, in the words of Neil Postman and I’m sure you’ve all read him’, I pursued with dramatic pauses, ‘We educators. Must always ask ourselves. That fundamental question. “What is the problem. To which this technology. Is the solution?”’

Post-interview, the panel decided that their solution for filling the teaching position would lie with another candidate.

Go it alone

Only towards the latter stages of my job search did I seek any assistance from friends and ex-colleagues. One teacher friend, Yara, grounded me: ‘These days, any student is a couple of clicks away from finding an available English teacher at $3 an hour. Why would anyone hire you?’ She was echoed by a friend, Claudia, who, on browsing my documents, remarked ‘You’re too old. Lop ten years off your CV. Once you get the interview, you can get the job.’ (The reader will have guessed that Claudia has never interviewed me.)

‘Also’, she pursued, ‘With blended learning, transdisciplinarity and AI you must demonstrate knowledge of and devotion to EdTech. Do I have to tell you what EdTech is?’ She did. It means Education Technology and it’s why teaching centres are now paperless, students learn on their devices and an academic manager can run a teaching centre from a mobile phone. ‘So’, she concluded, ‘never question a recruiter whether their technology facilitates learning’. Oh.

The new academic year was approaching and I sat, still jobless, with my parents for tea and scones at a local cafe to review the past idle year. My mother placed a blunt knife on the top and in the middle of her scone and began pressing downwards. ‘That’s not how you cut a fruit scone’ my father objected. ‘It’s from the side and through the centre.’ ‘This is how I cut it’ my mother announced as her scone split then crumbled into uneven halves. Buoyed by her culinary victory she turned to me.

‘So, you turn up to interviews in an unironed t-shirt, then you sigh, scowl and sneer without realising it’ she commented whilst stirring the mint leaves in her tea pot. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you developed some self-awareness?’

‘In interviews I was watching myself on camera and didn’t see anything’, I protested.

‘So what you’re saying is’, she poured her mint tea, ‘that you can develop a sense of self-awareness just by watching yourself on Zoom?’

‘Maybe, aye.’

‘And you’re wondering why you’re still unemployed after a year:’ She took a sip from her tea.

‘So what you’re saying, mum,’ I sighed, ‘is that it’s a wonder how anyone ever gave me a job in the first place.’

Post-scriptum

Readers will be indifferent to know that at the end of the year Stephen gave up on teaching and retrained as a lifeguard at his local swimming pool. However, during the week of training, he was offered an EAP position for a British university and an opportunity to become a CELTA trainer. He’s now training teachers and makes them carry out mock interviews lest they make the same mistakes he made. They don’t.