Trust me. If you want to find out what it’s like teaching in a particular country be prepared to wade through loads of advertising rubbish if you decide to use Google!

We had an inquiry from one of our students who was interested in teaching in Croatia‏‎ and asked us to look into finding him work there. In the TEFL Resource Library here we’ve got loads of information about teaching all over the world from Afghanistan‏‎ to Vietnam‏‎… but at that time we had nothing on Croatia (since then we’ve added it) so I decided to do some research and see what I could come up with.

The first thing was a search online. I simply put in the words TEFL in Croatia into Google and waited.

What a waste of time that was.

At first glance it looks good: up comes a bunch of pages from TEFL companies around the world – mainly those who offer TEFL courses it must be said – who have specific pages for their students on what it’s like to teach in Croatia. But then when you go and look it’s simply rubbish. Either a cut and paste from Wikipedia which tells you nothing whatsoever about teaching in Croatia or a list of advertising blurb about XYZ TEFL Certificate which is ok to work in Croatia.

I looked at about 20 or 30 pages from TEFL course providers about teaching in Croatia and learned absolutely nothing about what it’s really like there. A complete waste of time and obviously just a ruse to get people to their websites to plug their courses.

In the end it took a lot more than cutting and pasting from Wikipedia to finally get some useful info about what it’s like in Croatia for the TEFL teacher. I scoured the internet to come up with some genuine information, I had an email exchange with an ICAL student we’ve got working there and spoke via Skype to an old friend who went their on holiday last year just to get a feel for what it’s like.

And in the end I came up with this article: TEFL in Croatia‏‎.

Ok, it’s not the TEFL equivalent of the Michelin guide but it’s something to work with and from here we’ll slowly add more information as we come across it and as we get more feedback from ICAL students working there. But at least it’s something genuine and if you want to know about TEFL in Croatia there’s something real there, not just a bit of fluff pretending to be serious information to fool people into visiting your site.