I’ve been seeing a lot of job ads for a solo teaching job at Sagan Speak recently. So far all of the reviews I’ve seen of Sagan Speak have been overwhelmingly negative, with some reviews citing negative experiences such as being ghosted after the interview, having to set up health insurance, pension and taxes on their own, and being thrown into the job with no training whatsoever with minimal communication or support afterwards. I personally am not planning to apply to them any time soon, but I’m genuinely curious as to whether or not the negative reviews are really as bad as people say, so please feel free to talk about any experiences you’ve had with Sagan Speak!
by Curious_Vacation25
8 comments
>being ghosted after the interview
Very likely from any eikaiwa position.
>having to set up health insurance, pension and taxes on their own
Almost universal in the industry.
>being thrown into the job with no training whatsoever
Also nearly universal.
>with minimal communication or support afterwards
Completely normal.
This stuff isn’t even “bad” compared to most opportunities, so there’s literally zero reason to suspect the reviews to be inaccurate. Especially for a small Eikaiwa in Tokyo run by a Japanese person and started in the bubble era.
Bad is the best one can hope for in what’s left of the Eikaiwa industry.
From here on, wherever you choose to work, you will be dealing with varying degrees of worse.
Everything I’ve seen and heard suggests Sagan Speak to be an ordinarily parasitic dispatch company so long as you don’t have to deal with the management. Once the management gets involved, they become a nightmare. My diagnosis is a massive case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. They claim to have a teaching method, but it’s been half-remembered and misarticulated by management until they could boil it down to solve every problem in the classroom by shouting. And every problem outside the classroom. Their management really just loves to shout at people, and if you work for them long enough they’re going to inflict that on you, regardless of how good of a job you’re doing.
I wish my company wanted me to set up my pension on my own.
Two friends of mine work for Sagan and only have positive things to say about them. Yes they did both have to set up their health care and pension on their own, but Sagan gave them heads up about that as part of the interview packet and was on call with a bunch of resources to help them do that and other government paperwork stuff like that anytime they needed. Likewise, both friends remark that any time they send an email to either of their Sagan bosses about anything work related, they always get clear full responses within 24 hours.
The minimal job training thing is true, but both of them were hired for places because they already had a few years experience in the industry and Sagan expected they would be able to hit the ground running and adapt at their new schools. I can definitely see their experience being disorienting for someone who has never taught before, but I was under the impression that Sagan was only trying to hire people with teaching credentials/training/experience.
Now just because my two friends have had a good time so far, doesn’t mean that all the other negative reviews are automatically void, like, it could just be they’re having an exceptionally good experience so far. However, knowing that there’s a bias for outliers with bad beats to more frequently and vocally post about this stuff, the one thing that makes me a little bit suspicious is the exact claims about bad management communication/response times, since that’s the one thing both my friends agree on has been a lot better with Sagan than their previous dispatch jobs.
Still, it could also be a matter of misaligned expectations; like if a new hire expected a lot of training/guidance and Sagan expected a new hire to be mostly independent, that could to really bad mutual feels when the job reality set in, and of course in those situations, the burden of responsibility for clearly communicating expectations is totally on Eikaiwa/Dispatch company and I completely sympathize with anyone who has run into that problem. Still, as far as I know, Sagan isn’t exceptionally bad for any of these things and a lot of it just comes from industry wide problems for this kind a stuff too. I sorta take it all with a grain of a salt at this point.
Don’t have time to post an in depth post, but my experience with Sagan was pretty positive overall. As with most dispatch companies, i recommend using them as a stepping stone rather than the end-game. With that in mind, being there for a few years can be helpful to your resume, especially if you are placed at a great school (most are).
Honestly, for dispatch they weren’t the worst, yet the conditions are far from being favorable.
While management is quick to respond to any issue you may bring up, I felt they were quite verbose and pompous in their responses. When I had issues with coworkers working through the same company, my complaints were largely ignored, however when Japanese colleagues voiced those same complaints, the action taken was swift.
They’re not keen on giving raises or trying to improve your working conditions
They do pay well and leave you alone for the most part (bar some rather tedious paperwork), but honestly I’d use them to get your foot in the door towards direct hire
I’ve known a few people working for them and they didn’t sound bad at all for what they are. For example, I believe they mostly don’t set you up for deskwarming, meaning once your classes are done you are out the door. That alone puts them above most other dispatch companies, before considering that they pay or they used to pay way more.
I also heard that they’re very hands off once you get started, but honestly most experienced teachers would consider that to be a plus. Having worked for another, bigger ALT company before, the training was not particularly useful nor was it fun having to go into the office on days off to grind through it.