The Whole Getting A Job Thing

For those who don’t know Schnitzel and I in our true, human form I thought I’d take a moment to talk very briefly about the whole job thing. Before Schnitzel and I came to Berlin, we were wondering how we could find work- what with German unemployment being what it is and German taxes being what they are. Our poor language ability probably wouldn’t help us finding a job either. So then what?


Ads for Berlitz, Hartnack, and the plethora of other Fremdsprache schools appear all over Berlin. However, getting a job there is not only difficult for a non-German speaker, but can be monetarily difficult as well.

Having taught ESL for 7 years or so, I thought that might be the obvious route, but after a great deal of trolling the ESL forums on Dave’s ESL Café (aka: the land of old, bitter ESL teachers), Toytown (the land of slightly younger but not much less bitter ESL teachers), and various other sites devoted to the fine pursuit of working for low pay, with no benefits, to spread the good word of Englische, I quickly realized this was not a viable option. Here are the reasons why: 1) getting a job as an ESL teacher not only requires you to know English, but in most cases they will want you to speak pretty good German. (I know this is the case for the major companies such as Wallstreet, Berlitz, Prolog, etc.) You might luck out and find a company that wants to hire you with no knowledge of German, but this is unlikely as even getting through the resume & interview stages will be difficult and there are plenty of English teachers who do speak German floating about. 2) Taxes are a whopping 16% per euro after 7500 euros 3) Additionally, you must mandatorily pay in to a pension plan 19% of your income that I’ve heard tell you can get back after a couple years once you go back to your home country. I think this does not apply if you stay more than 5 years. 4) Once you take taxes and pension and health care (which you usually have to get for yourself) into consideration, you are then losing about 50% of your income (this is the average figure of course) and suddenly that 20 euros an hour doesn’t seem so great. In one case, I heard that an ESL teacher from the states had checked and discovered that she was earning less working as an English teacher per hour than part-time McDonalds employees. Awesome. Another English teacher mentioned that they pay in Germany the equivalent of what they pay in Thailand, where the cost of living is much much lower. 5) This one’s a real kicker. There’s actually a law that states that any employer accepting new hires must for a certain period of time (determined by the job) attempt to fill the position with an EU resident or German national. The period varies per job, but I’ve heard that for ESL jobs it can be 1-3 months. That means, that for an entire 1-3 months they are not allowed (by law!) to hire Americans, Canadians, Aussies, and the like. Why? Possibly because we swear a lot, drink crappy beer, and have currency whose value is rapidly becoming commensurate with toiler paper? I really don’t know. All the same, a no-go.


Supposedly, after taxes are considered an ESL instructor can end up earning about the same wages as an employee of German McDonalds.

Schnitzel (who is a computer-type) was in a similar but different boat. The IT industry is reported as being “desperate” for programmers. However, what they don’t mention is that like any high-paying German job they will also take out 16% tax, expect you to pay a large portion of generally pretty expensive health insurance plans (avg. around 220 euro), and speak fluent German.


Ah, the fast-paced working environment that is telecommuting.

Luckily, Schnitzel and I in the end didn’t have to worry about this as we were able to keep our jobs and work remotely. Honestly, if you’re an American or Canadian and you have the opportunity to work remotely this is a very good option, but unfortunately it does leave your money being 75% of what it is worth back home. Hence, a normal 8 euro German meal is 12 dollars, a 40 euro bike is $60, 600 euros in rent is $900. The relatively inexpensive can become expensive in this way, but at least your taxes can be done in your native tongue, and you don’t have to worry about paying into pension plans you will never use. The other down-side is that getting a residence permit (which is either linked to having a German job or being a German student) leaves you with only one option: school. And if you’re not planning on being a student again this is probably a bit of a pickle for you. Luckily, Schnitzel and I are both intending to enroll in school this April, and as visas are only issued for 6 month periods (unless your German is really good), we’ll probably have to be in school for a long time in order to live here. We'll keep you updated of course on all the wonderful visa action.