EEducation in Japan

Thoughts on CLI?

  • January 6, 2025

I have an interview with them and they sent me a rundown of the salary [The pay package is 172,500 Yen / month + rent-free, fully-furnished apartment. As well as no rent, you also won't pay any 'key money', so the apartment is worth about 75,000 Yen / month over the course of a year. Which makes the pay package worth just under 250,000 Yen / month.]

No specifications yet with the working hours and scole of responsibilities. I have some other interviews lined up. I just want to know everyone's opinion especially with the company's environment.

Edit: Sorry about the CLI abbreviation. It's California Language Institute.

by Time-Technician-6507

9 comments

  1. Is that pay package what you actually get? Or does tax and pension still come out of it?

  3. What is CLI? I honestly clicked here thinking it was a new ESL term I hadn’t heard yet, or someone mistaking the abbreviation CLIL.

    OP, don’t expect anyone to understand the abbreviation of a name of some random small eikaiwa – spell out the entire name and provide a link.

    As for the job offer, some red flags:

    Small family-owned eikaiwa can sometimes be black companies. That means an owner who is a control freak, an incompetent idiot, a drunk, in a perpetual state of anger, or all four.

    That is a VERY low salary. And the fact that they are recruiting from abroad, and want you to live in an apartment they provide instead of paying you a real salary, is a red flag.

    This also means you are beholden to them for a place to live – in other words, if you don’t like the job, if they turn out to be abusive assholes, your choice will be to stay with them or be homeless.

    Look at the apartment before you agree to live in it. Pictures can fool you into thinking it’s bigger than it really is, cleaner that it really is, and they could pull a bait-and-switch on you and put you in a damp windowless basement with a ragged futon on a cement floor. This has happened.

    If you don’t know anything about the company, look it up on [Glassdoor.com](http://Glassdoor.com) to see if there are any reviews. If you can’t find any reviews, speak to some current employees. And if you can’t speak to any current employees, then don’t take the job.

    And if you take the job anyway, because you just HAVE to be in Japan, then at least make sure you have enough money to survive here just in case they are abusive assholes and you need to quit in first week and move across the country to escape them.

    This scenario is NOT uncommon. There are horror stories here in this forum; go read them.

  5. CLI are shite. When I did interviews with them years back they describe it as sunshine and roses but they’re significantly underpaying you, their staff let themselves into your apartment without you there (noted that people reported missing things) and the owner apparently is a massive narcissist and bully. Save yourself the time and money and go elsewhere. They made heart corp look appealing.

  8. I interviewed with them before, back in 2021. They didn’t have a decency to tell me that I was rejected until I reached out to them.

  9. I interviewed and was offered a job with them a few months ago. I turned it down because of the working hours. The interviewer stated that some days he travels so far that he isn’t home until 10pm. You may be sent to a city where you’ll have to stay over night two times a week depending upon where you are. The work seemed simple. They really lay out everything for you. You’re basically teaching from a script. But I didn’t like the excessive hours and lack of a consistent schedule. The interview lasted two hours because the guy kept talking. 😩

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