Progressing Your Career

It is normal for any employee anywhere to look to advance their career, and British Council employees are certainly no different.  Most companies or organisations have reasonably clear career paths, and most employees can expect to make progress if they are committed and play their cards right. 

So how is the British Council different?  Well, the most important factor is that almost all managerial positions are based on what is called the competency based interview, which is basically a series of questions designed to test your development in specific skills areas.  That's fine as far as it goes.  However, importantly, no consideration is taken of you holistically.  For example, your years of service, your achievements, your contributions, etc, none of these will count.  It's simply how you handle the set of questions you get on the day that matters.  It's also possible to coach oneself up for these questions, as they tend be highly formulaic, as is so typical within the BC.  So what happens is that the most suitable candidates don't necessarily get the position.  It's more likely to be someone who is clever at handling that type of interview.

Incredibly, within the British Council, there is no management training.  Basically, managers pick up the job as they go along. It also means that teachers trying to move up the scale are often caught in a Catch 22 situation.  For example, a candidate might be asked, "Describe a time when you ...." relative to a management role.  However, if you've never been in such a role, how are you going to answer that question?  Most people either make something up or try to bluff their way through.  It also opens the door for teachers applying from outside the BC who have managed at other schools, because they can easily leapfrog you.  The reason this is of concern is because, as per usual, the British Council shows no loyalty to its own.  When I was with the BC, I saw so many managers come in from other schools, often bringing in a completely different corporate culture and associated values.

So what's the solution? Well, one obvious one would be simply to start giving proper management training courses, specifically tailored to the needs and values of the British Council.  That way, any teacher interested in progressing could do a course, such that when he or she then applies for a management role, he or she will be in a strong position and fully clued up.  It would also make it much easier for existing BC personnel to progress ahead of external candidates.  The other obvious improvement would be to expand the interview, so that any candidate is assessed holistically.

One would think that someone somewhere in the British Council's Human Resources department in London would be coming up with ideas like this and more. Sadly, however, this is not so.  The big shots in HR seem only to be concerned with recruiting big names for the upper echelons of the BC.  They seem completely unconcerned about the situation at ground level in teaching centres. And in many ways, this is the whole problem with the BC, in that the rot starts from the top.  It's that complete lack of interest and indifference toward the lot of the average teacher that personifies the British Council.

Let's hope the HR leaders in London can start doing something to justify their high salaries.

Cons - Part One

The main downside of working for the British Council as a teacher sadly comes from the management itself.  The simple fact is that no one in the management hierarchy genuinely cares about you as an individual.  When you start any job with a new company or organisation, you might reasonably assume, or at least hope, that someone is following and taking an interest in your progress and development.  Unfortunately, this is not so within the British Council.  In fact, it is possible that the manager of your centre knows almost nothing about you, apart from scraps of information here and there.

To understand this anomaly, it is important to grasp how the British Council is structured.  One of the most significant features is that everyone on a global contract is expected to move on after four years.  What this does is to create a huge sense of impermanence and insecurity.  It's possible that you will start a new job, and then within a year a complete new management team will have taken over.  How can they possibly be expected to know about your contribution to date, other than some scant "handover notes" left by the departing manager?

What this system does is to create a culture in which everyone just looks after their own interests, without much concern for anyone else other than those in their immediate work orb.  This is particularly true of the senior managers.  They are almost all eyeing up their next position, and largely using the current one as fodder.  Almost all British Council managers seem to have this blinkered approach.  Why should they be overly concerned about any centre and the people there when they know they will be moving on in a couple of years?

In addition to this, your line manager will only be a senior teacher, a mere one level up from you.  He or she cannot reasonably be expected to take responsibility for your development.  For them, line managing you is simply a box ticking exercise.  You're basically just a job of work for them. Most of them are overworked anyway. And you can be sure that the centre manager will delegate as much work as possible to the line manager.  In fact, "see your line manager" has become a kind of mantra within the British Council.  To some extent it may be genuine delegation of duties, but more often than not the centre manager just doesn't want to be bothered and wants to be left alone to focus on more important matters than a mere teacher.

The net result is that most teachers fail to establish any kind of rapport with the senior management, which naturally leads to low morale and a feeling of frustration.  It's natural in any work environment that an employee wants to feel valued and recognised, but this is precisely what is missing in the British Council set up.  You have instead a management team that is not seriously interested in you, but only with overall figures and numbers. Remember, British Council Teaching Centres are now expected to be run as businesses.  You will rarely receive praise or recognition for any of your work, that's if they even know about it.

I'll go into more detail in future posts, particularly with regard to the lack of rapport between management and teachers, and the British Council's obsession with procedures rather than people, as well as their famous buck passing.  But, meanwhile, to sum up so far, you have a situation in which you may feel loyalty towards the British Council, but that feeling will certainly not be reciprocated.  You may do several years of service and make all kinds of valuable contributions, but if anything goes wrong you will be dropped like a hot brick.  Any teacher is fully dispensable, and no manager is likely to take more than a passing interest in you.  No one is ultimately responsible for you. 
 

The Rise of Cliquism

Hi Bloggers,

The British Council has a fairly bizarre method of recruitment, in that all contracts are only for fixed periods.  There are no permanent jobs.  Also, most centres insist that teachers move on every four years.  So when a teacher or manager's time comes, it is hardly surprising that a certain amount of insecurity occurs.  One of the ways some managers resolve this situation is through developing a clique system.  Effectively, they can rotate jobs or create new posts so that friends can stay on.  In many ways this is an unfortunate scenario, yet at the same time is an intelligent solution to a problem that the British Council creates for itself.  A great example of this is seen in Bangkok.  You can be sure that many of the managers there will still be there ten years from now.  They will control everything in the foreseeable future.  Non-clique members, on the other hand, will have difficulty establishing themselves.  Bahrain also provided an excellent example when they had the ex-Sri Lanka clique, which was then replaced by a group more defined by age than anything else.  Ageism, incidentally, is rampant within the BC.

One way this is maintained is through the job interview system, since all interviews and positions are based on a competency test rather than a holistic assessment of the candidate.  As a result the system can easily be manipulated.  For example, it's very easy to massage the results of an interview and claim that on a particular day a candidate performed better than  another one.  A holistic interview, which might include age, character, commitment, years of service, contributions to date, etc, would be more difficult to twist.  I experienced this myself when I was in Bahrain.  The dominant clique at the time basically saw me as too old and as not fitting in with their particular vision.  Basically, it was ageism.   Despite having been with the BC for seven years and having had my Diploma for over two years, a younger teacher who hadn't even completed her first two year contract was given the coordinator position on offer over me.  Needless to say she was a clique member.

Thus generally making progress within the BC is a very precarious business and depends largely on who likes  you and who doesn't.  In some ways that's human nature, but one would have hoped that an organisation like the BC would have a better system, in which a teacher could develop his career in a much more progressive kind of way rather than depend on the hit or miss system currently in place.