How To Get A Job In Thailand – Things You Should Know

I’ve been living and working in Thailand for 8 years.

I’m going to walk you through the world of work here in the Kingdom. I’ll cover everything that you need to know including the pros and cons of working in Thailand, the jobs that are available for foreigners, salaries and benefits, how to find the best job opportunities. I’ll discuss my own personal experiences as well as the experiences of many of my friends and the lessons that I’ve learned along the way.

Why Should You Work in Thailand?

First, working in Thailand will provide you with a valid long-term residence visa. If you’re under 50, obtaining a residence visa has actually become one of the most challenging aspects of living in Thailand, and a work visa definitely solves that problem. Your employer will also handle all the cumbersome and annoying visa application and reporting requirements, as well as a bank account which you’ll be able to keep regardless of your employment status.

Working in Thailand is a great way to test out the waters living here and get yourself set up long term. Simply being in Thailand on the ground will give you the opportunity to meet fellow expats and network. Networking goes an extremely long way in finding opportunities in Thailand. Two of the three jobs that I’ve had here have come from networking, and they were the two good jobs.

Working in Thailand will provide you with an income, and that income might be higher than you expect. You can actually find very well-paid jobs in Thailand, but you have to understand the job market first.

Understanding the Job Market

It’s important to be aware: foreigners are restricted from doing any job that a Thai citizen can do. This includes any type of sales jobs, manual labor, skilled trades the list is quite long. But there are still plenty of jobs that you can do, from teaching to management, legal services. The truth is that most Western multinational companies hire Western management and professionals.

Salary Ranges for Foreigners in Thailand

So what kind of salary can you expect from each role?

At the low end of the spectrum, English teaching jobs at public, private, and language schools generally range between around 35,000 Thai baht and 60,000 baht per month. Although these salaries may seem unattractive, the cost of living in Thailand is fairly low, so you can live a reasonably good quality of life on this kind of salary.

But if you’re looking to work in Thailand for a longer period of time, you should generally aim for a more professional job which will have a salary that’s comparable with Western salaries. For example, salaries for properly certified professional teachers at International Schools range between 100,000 and 200,000 baht per month.

Or you could opt to pursue a career in international business management at hotels and other large Western brands, and the salaries will normally range between 100,000 and 500,000 baht per month.

All of these positions normally come with excellent benefits including housing, lengthy vacation time, health insurance, annual return flights, bonuses, and pensions. Just keep in mind that these positions are highly competitive, and you need to map out a strategy in order to land a good professional job here in Thailand. I’ll get into that later, so make sure to stick around.

But if you do get a professional job, the salary is exceptionally good when compared with the low cost of living.

The Long-Term Advantage: Staying Plugged In

Which brings me to my final pro for working in Thailand: keeping a foot in the world of work will ensure that you have plenty of options regardless of which direction you choose in life. When you first come to Thailand, it may appear tempting to totally disconnect from the rat race back home. But there are a lot of benefits to staying plugged into a professional world over the long term.

Professional jobs offer progressive salaries that allow you to have a much more comfortable life as you get older. Over the years of living in Thailand, I’ve met a lot of expats that regret having totally unplugged from the professional world. After all, living in Thailand is very different than visiting as a tourist. Life takes on a certain normalcy, and your priorities will change over time. And the reality is that you can live in Thailand while actually advancing a career.

How to Find a Job in Thailand

How do you actually go about finding a job in Thailand? The short answer is it depends on the job.

The easiest jobs to find are definitely teaching in the public or private schools here. There are always plenty of positions available, and the only requirements are to be from a native English-speaking country and to hold a bachelor’s degree in any subject. Alas, these are also the lowest paid jobs and can also have toxic and precarious work environments.

In terms of salaries:

• Public School teachers tend to be the lowest paid, with salaries normally ranging between 35,000 and 40,000 baht per month.
• University lecturers earn about the same amount, but the environment is generally much more relaxed with much lower teaching hours and a much more independent environment. It can feel a little bit more like a part-time job.
• Private school teachers tend to be paid a little bit more, at around 50,000 to 60,000 baht per month.
• Language School teachers normally earn a similar wage but with significantly less vacation time only 2 weeks of paid vacation compared with 8 to 10 weeks in the public and private systems.

Where to Find Teaching Jobs

In order to find one of these jobs, if you’re new to Thailand and you don’t have any networks, your best option is to check on the website ajarn.com. This is the main job listing website for the public and private schools in Thailand. These schools generally prefer to interview and hire candidates who are already in the country, so it’s best to start applying shortly before or after you arrive, which should be around March the main hiring season for the academic year that begins in May.

In terms of documents, make sure to bring your official degrees, transcripts, and a police background check, as you’ll likely need to provide these when you’re applying for the job and during the visa process.

Red Flags and Toxic Work Environments

It’s generally not difficult to land a job at a Thai school, but you want to be a little bit selective because there are toxic work environments that you want to avoid.

I worked at a private school very briefly here in Bangkok, and take my experience as a cautionary tale about hastily accepting a job offer. I arrived in 2015 totally naive about the entire job market or education system here in Thailand. I decided to try out teaching and I applied for a few jobs. I quickly received responses and went for a few interviews.

Looking back at the interviews now, I definitely didn’t ask the right questions or notice the glaring red flags in front of me. I’ll get into those shortly. And I accepted an offer at the private school paying me 55,000 baht per month not great for a full-time schedule, but not that bad compared to the 35,000 baht jobs that are commonly advertised. And I was looking for an opportunity to get my feet on the ground and try out teaching and living in Thailand.

When I arrived on my first day, the program manager assigned me 26 teaching periods, teaching six different subjects to six different grade levels. In case you’ve never taught, that’s a lot of lessons, subjects, and grade levels to teach in one term. The rest of the staff was brand new. I recall wondering what happened to the prior staff, but it was all so busy and hectic that I simply ignored it.

One American guy who had apparently joined shortly before me was sleeping on a bench outside most of the day. “What are you doing?” “Nothing, me just hanging around.”

As the week progressed, it also became clear that the school expected the teachers to run a summer camp during one of their vacation periods. This was not disclosed in the interview but suddenly appeared in the contract.

While I was dealing with my visa, several of the Thai administrative staff told me the story about what had happened to the prior teachers. The owners had cut their salaries significantly and forced them all to quit in the prior year. Some of those teachers had been with the school for many years and their salaries had progressed incrementally. Rather than reward loyalty, the owners had decided to aggressively push the staff out with bad contracts and hire an entirely new staff on lower wages. The only remaining staff member was the program manager, who had clearly cooperated with the ownership in dispatching the previous staff and was putting on a jovial performance that masked the ruthlessness of the actual environment.

I was about 2 weeks into the job, and fortunately a friend of mine who worked at a university offered me a job there.

The reality is that some private schools can be very ruthless, and you want to avoid these. Always keep an eye out for red flags: frequent job postings, large staff turnovers, unclear contracts or schedules, any changes in the contracts or schedules, general disorganization, or an inability to answer basic questions at the interview.

Questions to Ask at a Teaching Interview

You should ask questions when you go to an interview such as:

• What does a typical teaching day look like?
• How many classes are on the schedule?
• What about class sizes?
• What books will the students use?
• Is there a lot of staff turnover?
• What about holidays? Are they fully paid, or is there an expectation that teachers will do a summer camp?

And always check the contract to make sure that there are no summer camp clauses and that it’s a full 12-month contract, as some schools have been known to offer 11-month contracts in order to avoid paying a month of vacation time at the end of the year.

Before you sign that contract, check the Reddit reviews. There are plenty of threads about any given school on Reddit, and this can highlight any potential issues to keep an eye out for.

When it comes to salaries for TEFL positions, if you’re a native English speaker with a bachelor’s degree, you shouldn’t accept anything less than 50,000 Thai baht for a full-time job. Universities may be a little bit lower, but they are a lot more relaxed. 50,000 baht will allow you to live comfortably here in Thailand, but you won’t exactly be living the high life, and you definitely won’t be saving or investing for your future. This shouldn’t be your long-term plan.

My experience at the private school is an even more cautionary tale for spending a long time working as an unlicensed teacher. They become totally dependent on the whims of profit-motivated private schools where salary and work environments can shift dramatically with little recourse.

If you want to try out living in Thailand and teaching, spending a year or two at a public or private school is a great option. But if you plan to spend any longer than that, you should definitely get yourself properly certified and move into the international education market.

Avoid TEFL Agencies

Before we move on to finding international school jobs, let’s talk a little bit about agencies. While you’re browsing the job forums, you’ll invariably come across TEFL agencies. And if you’re looking to teach in Thailand and you’re unfamiliar with the job market, you might be tempted to use an agency.

My simple advice: don’t, ever. Agencies do very little and take a large chunk of your already meager salary for essentially forwarding your resume to schools that would have hired you on the spot anyway. If you teach at a public or private school, it’s very common to encounter one or two teachers in the staff room who made the mistake of signing on with an agency, and they’re normally paid 30 to 35% less than everyone else. That’s the agency cut for an entire year for literally sending your resume to the school.

In my brief private school stint, we had one teacher who had been hired through an agency. The manager often joked that they would have just hired him anyway, and everybody had a laugh at the fact that he was getting paid 35% less than everyone else. Don’t be that guy or girl.

International School Jobs

Let’s move on to finding international school jobs. International schools were built to serve the expat population in countries around the world. But over the years, the value of a Western education has been appreciated by much of the world, and these schools now serve a mix of international expat kids as well as wealthier and middle-class local Thai kids.

The work environment at International Schools is normally very good, with very reasonable teaching hours, class sizes, and great support systems. International management means that you’ll be in a much more familiar work environment.

The pay is great at around 100,000 to 200,000 baht including housing, annual flights back home, great health insurance, 12 to 14 weeks of paid vacation, and excellent pension plans. You have plenty of great career options for advancement both within Thailand or in your home country or in any country around the world.

But you’ll need that professional license before you apply for any jobs, and the process can be quite competitive in cities like Bangkok.

How to Get Into Tier 1 International Schools

You can find jobs using several methods, and it really depends on what career path you want to take.

Tier 1 schools the top schools can definitely be a bit trickier. These schools prefer to hire candidates from outside Thailand who have at least two years of recent experience teaching in their home country or at another Tier 1 international school. Normally the best method to get into a Tier 1 school is to apply to those other Tier 1 schools in less desirable locations like China, where the demand is very high. You’ll have a much easier time entering that Tier 1 market. Once you’ve done a full two-year contract, you can make the lateral move over to Thailand to a similar tiered school.

The main advantage of this approach is that once you’re in that Tier 1 system, you can move to other Tier 1 schools anywhere around the world. If you want the best career path, this is the method to use. It just takes a little bit of prep work.

When you’re actually looking for those jobs, you can use two different methods. First, you can use highly reputable agencies that work directly with international schools, including International Search Associates and Schrole.

If you’re keen to move to Thailand immediately after finishing a degree, you’ll definitely have better luck aiming for jobs at Tier 2 and 3 schools, which can also be very good. You can normally find these jobs at tes.com or Indeed. You can also look up a list of the international schools in the location that you want to teach in say Bangkok and make a list and apply directly at the schools by sending a cover letter along with your resume.

If you’re aiming for a Tier 2 or 3 school, you can definitely find positions through networking. Many teachers come to Thailand post-qualification, take a job at a private school or a Tier 3 international school, and over time they use their networks to move up the career ladder given that they’ve got the necessary qualifications. This is also a great strategy and allows you to get on the ground very quickly.

Other Professional Options: Management and Hotels

We’ve covered teaching jobs in Thailand, but what about other professional options? Personally, I’ve had friends in a wide variety of different occupations here in the country, but management is definitely the second most popular job amongst the foreigners that I’ve met restaurants, gyms, and especially hotels.

Nearly every multinational corporation in Thailand employs Western management teams, and this includes positions throughout the management hierarchy, which gives you plenty of entry-level, mid-level, and upper-level management positions. Hotel management in particular is the largest single sector simply due to the size and number of hotels here in the country. These can be great positions with excellent pay packages normally ranging between 100,000 and 500,000 baht per month.

You can find these positions on Indeed.com, but the hotel and management industry in general is very network oriented. Most of my friends who work in management got their positions through networking. It’s a very small world, and management teams will normally share invites to their specific events throughout the industry. This means that each manager, mid-manager, and entry-level manager will attend parties and events and meet all of the other managers located here in a city like Bangkok. This creates a small community where everybody is a known quantity.

Once you’re in that community, you’ll find it very easy to move up to fill positions as they open up in any of the big hotel chains or nightclubs. As people know you, they trust you, and these are the preferred hires.

Getting Your Foot in the Door

But how do you get into those first entry-level positions? In many respects, this is quite similar to the Tier 1 international schools. Positions in Bangkok are very competitive, and normally it’s much easier to get an entry-level position in a less attractive destination.

Friends of mine have applied for jobs at big hotel chains in much less attractive places, spent one or two years there on a contract, built the necessary experience, built the network within a large chain, and then applied for lateral moves into Bangkok, into Thailand. Once they’re in Thailand, they can start to climb that ladder via all the networking events.

It’s all about getting your foot in the door, and this model applies across virtually the entire management industry here in Thailand. It’s very beneficial to pursue roles in larger companies for this reason. I’ve met recent business graduates who moved here, found roles in smaller companies, and struggled to advance their careers simply because they were outside of these larger networks.

If you construct a good strategy, you can build an excellent career while enjoying your life in Thailand. And like the international schools, once you’re in those big networks, you can transfer to nearly any other country around the world or return to your home country and find a great job utilizing all your experience that you’ve built in your career.

Bureaucratic and Official Roles

Finally, there are positions available in more bureaucratic and official roles: embassy attaches, international and non-governmental organizations, trade representatives. There are a wide variety of very specific positions that you can definitely find here in Thailand, but these are definitely the most difficult positions to obtain and are normally only open for internal applicants with lots of experience within an organization.

I’ve had plenty of friends in these industries. For them, coming to Thailand was normally secondary to their career goals. For example, I’ve had multiple friends who worked at the American Embassy, and normally they rotate in on three-year contracts before moving to another country. It’s part of a much larger career that they’re pursuing.

I’ve also had friends who worked at international organizations, and normally they had over 5 years of experience working within the organization and ultimately transferred into Thailand through an internal posting process. I had another friend who worked for a Chamber of Commerce, and he transferred over from a government organization where he worked as a trade representative.

It’s definitely possible to pursue a position like this, but you’re looking at a much longer career path before you’ll ever come to Thailand. For this reason, if your goal is to live in Thailand or move around relatively freely, your best options are definitely at the international schools or in international business management.