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Miguel Gervais (Saitama-ken, Fukaya City, 2000-03) founded and runs the M.L.C.英会話 (eikaiwa) school in Fukaya City, Saitama-ken which currently teaches approximately 45-50 students. He is originally from Canada and was kind enough to write this article in response to a JetWit request to share his career experience.
Any other JET alums interested in sharing their own career advice, experience and perspectives are encouraged to e-mail your article idea to Steven at jetwit [at] jetwit [dot] com.
Having a Job is Irresponsible
My friend Jack is a fine, upstanding person and a great teacher. He’s been in Japan for untold years, had a job that he liked well enough and is blessed with a wonderful family. Unfortunately, the college that had hired him for the past 10 years or so suddenly refused to renew his yearly contract. In their magnanimity, they told him this one month before he was due to start the new school year. Obviously, this was much too late to find another job.
Jack is a great teacher. He is a valuable asset… and yet he is now unemployed and in rather desperate straits. But things could have been even worse… he could have been forced to leave Japan, just like untold numbers of other teachers after the NOVA debacle. Luckily, he is on a spousal visa and was spared this final humiliation.
Don’t let this happen to you! Life-time employment has never been in the cards for foreign teachers in Japan. Unless you are officially tenured, don’t make the mistake of thinking that your position is safe! You may find that your contract does not get renewed because of age, because of sudden downturns in the economy, because another agency underbid your agency, or even because of a company whim. Your job is NOT SAFE! Relying on Lady-Luck is not a good game-plan.
Being dependent on a single yearly contract for 80% or more of your household income is risky. It’s not a safe long-term plan. Too many bad things can happen. It’s irresponsible to rely on it for EVERYTHING.
Worse yet would be to combine a single job with a large amount of debt. It’s bad enough to lose your job, but the debt payments can’t simply be put on hold.
So, what can you do?
Act Rich.
Having Multiple Streams of Income is Responsible
According to “The Millionaire Next Door”, wealthy people have 8 common habits. One of them is that they have multiple streams of income.
And so, whereas most people think of their job as their income, I would invite you to think about your job as ONE of your income streams. Surely you’ll find that you have other streams of income.
What about the interest you get from the bank? Your stocks? Your Mutual Funds? Your royalty checks?
Yeah, who gets royalty checks anyway!?
Seriously though, the interest you earn is probably more like a trickle than a flood of income, but it should be there. With your job providing some capital, it should also be possible to increase the flow of income from your investments.
For now, though let’s take another look at the work side of things. Do you have any skills that can be turned into income streams? Can you interpret or translate? Can you write? Can you teach English? Can you fix up cars? Can you do weddings?
If you have a marketable skill, consider putting it to use outside of your day-job. I often hear about the under-utilization of ALTs. This is wonderful! Underused ALTs have all of the time in the world to develop a second stream of income to balance out the risk of their primary job.
Moonlighting can be rewarding in a large number of ways. Knowing that everything you do after 4pm goes straight to your pocket can be a huge motivator. Working at your second job while you’re being underused at your primary job is strangely cathartic. Mixing up what you do can also improve your skills in other fields and keep you sane through the drudgery of the day job. Finally, it can lead to extra safety visa-wise.
When you have 2-3 employers, you can self-sponsor your visa based on the multiple part-time jobs you hold. See http://livinginfo.gaijinpot.com/visas for more details. This to my mind is the penultimate safety. Even if you lose one contract, you still have the others to guarantee the continuation of your visa. The ultimate safety of course is to have a permanent resident visa and not have to rely on your employers at all.
At any rate, with the visa issue out of the way, you’ll probably find that you have much more freedom in what you can do.
At this point, you might even consider simply going into business for yourself. Starting a company may not be the easiest thing in the world, but it’s certainly worthwhile if you find that much of your income comes (or could potentially come) from self-employment.
If you’re considering becoming an entrepreneur, I’d love to hear from you. Tell me what you’d like to do and perhaps I can help out.
Sincerely,
Miguel Gervais (Saitama-ken, Fukaya City, 2000-03)
M.L.C.英会話
MLCeikaiwa [at] gmail [dot] com.
one comment so far...
That sounds all well and good, but remember: You need to apply for “Permission to engage in activity other than that permitted under the status of residence previously granted” (資格外活動許可) and get permission from your CO (if you’re a JET) in order to work a second job. This may not apply to spouse visas, but most JETs are not on spouse visas.