Found a call center job by just showing up?

Hermes

In Vietnam, China and Cambodia the best way to get an ESL teaching job is NOT by distance applications (emails etc). It is by showing up, properly dressed, resume in hand (which might not even get read) and being prepared, lucid and presentable. Ads will ask for all kinds of qualifications. But in fact if you show up when there is an immediate need there is a good chance you'll get hired. White face, necktie, warm body who speaks English well. That's about it.

Has anyone tried this in Indian call centers - by passing the recruiters and head offices and doing it the old fashioned personal way?

I'd be curious to hear from teachers actually working in India who have also worked in East or S.E. Asia. Compare lifestyle, wages, hours working, perks, hassles and joys etc. It should be possible to actually save more in India than Korea etc. I made good money in Vietnam and Japan but couldn't relate to the places. I had a wild party lifestyle in Cambodia but didn't save anything. Financial gain and emotional resonance would be cool.

GoanCanuck

You need to have an employment visa from the company which has hired you
before entering India. You can't come on a tourist visa and expect a company to hire you in a call centre unless you are a PIO.

Nick-H

Do remember that India is full of people who speak great English. That's why the call centres are there. They are very commercial, very professional places. You'd have to be very good to sell yourself on the spot without appropriate qualifications. Said all this before, the last time the question came up!

ANyway; welcome to IM

__________________
.


Just one member of the IndiaMike Mod Team

zzzehar

I myself have worked with few Call Centres for the last 3 years and I am still working !
Its absolutely not like you think It Is. Its very very professional where not even 0.00000000000000000000000001 percent of wrong practices or unprofessional behaviour is tolerated. And the call centres I hv worked with are all US based MNC's. I worked with CONVERGYS where we provided hardcore technical support to Microsoft's Clients and We worked Upto MS's Expectations and Now I am with DELL COMPUTER CORPORATION supporting their Desktop Dimension Systems and trust me the level of professionalism we follow here is very rare among other Indian/May be Foriegn Organizations. And yes they Pay really Good and my Job is indeed very satisfying - I am a Proud Technical Expert.

somnath

Hi Zzzehar,
The above line is very attractive and it is clear from your post that you are happy and enjoying your job. Keep it up.



- Somnath

oldhippie

In Vietnam, China and Cambodia the best way to get an ESL teaching job<<

Not true in the case of China. If you get caught w/o a work permit you get thrown in jail for 2 weeks, then fined and deported. Also if anyone hires you w/o a proper visa they school can be fined and shut down.

As for India you do need a work visa no company will hire you.

__________________
Too Many Gandus, Too Few Bullets.

guerik

But you need a company to hire you in advance to sponsor your work visa..


I almost took a "culture coach" job in India, while I was travelling on a tourist visa - they wanted people who were already in country and they would then somehow transfer the visa across to a work visa.
I have no idea how they do this though, or if it's even a valid possibility - they could be the dodgiest company on earth for all I know.

Rob_The_Pom

www.eslcafe.com is the place to try for these call centre jobs.
Many of them request an MA in ELT or Applied Linguistics.
I was thinking about applying for one when I finished my MA, but I have enormous moral issues with trying to make someone sound like they're British (or American) when they have a perfect good accent to start with.

__________________
There is no God but Dawkins and Hitchens is his prophet.

navinkurian2002

IF your a native brit or an american and have teaching skills you have an advantage over the locals when it comes to jobs for voice and accent trainings . V&A jobs are fun .

Nick-H

Think of it like drama school. Many of us change our accents according to who we are with or what we are doing: I used to know a broad Saath Londoner who sounded quite posh when being a telephone receptionist. Just another form of acting. Putting on the suit, putting on the accent...

Rob_The_Pom

A valid point Nick, but for me it goes to the deeper politics of the global spread of English.

Just the idea of telling someone to drop a perfectly comprehensible Indian accent, then trying to make them sound someone from the home counties, and getting them to call themselves 'Aaron', 'Dave', or 'Jim' just seems completely wrong to me.

It's linguistic imperialism, in that it tries to enforce someone elses linguistic norms (ie, British or American) onto the employees, and it also promotes McDonaldisation - it that it takes something hetrogeneous and tries to homogenise it. The end outcome of this is that eventually everyone ends up with a globally homogeneous accent.
It also imposes or at least imitates certain cultural norms - you must talk about the weather in Manchester, and what was on Eastenders last night.
As I said, the whole thing will have us living in McWorld one day - where everything is the same.

Digital Drifter

Rob, Stop reading the /wrong/ books. Especially articles by Arundhati Roy! Yours is in exactly the same spirit in which she eviscerated this practice of accents in call centers in the broader context of imperialism.

I think, oyu stopped taking the medications prescibed in the papers. :-)

__________________
Click here for the Indiamike train guide in PDF

livin-in-india

Accents

In business you give the customer what he wants. So, if the customer wants to be treated like a VIP, just because he spends lots of money on food and drink, it is the norm in the West to make him feel exactly like that. He gets his priority reservation in the restaurant/bar, a special "reserved" table. We all know that the "VIP" is no more important than anyone else, yet he is wiling to buy a certain experience.

The same applies to call centers. If the customer wants to speak to someone with the same accent, then business will let me. It isn't a moral issue, it is customer service issue. Imagine if the Thai cook wouldn't tone down his spices for my tongue on the same grounds. You adjust to the needs of the one you are serving especially if you are a huge MNC that wants huge amounts of customers.

Another Bold Headline

It does seem like the question was answered about to walk-in or to not walk-in in India. I've walked-in once in my traveling life, in Japan, and got myself hired instantly. Yet, upon gov't approval of my work visa request, I had to fly out of the country (I chose Korea) to get the work visa.

It was 1997-8, I worked 25 hours per week teaching English, had a wonderful time-fascinating cultural experience, and ended up saving $1000 US per month. I traveled Japan extensively and cheaply by hitchhiking and sleeping in my tent, and found Japan to be one of the greatest places to travel. I didn't however connect with the people in a deeper (mental-emotional) way, as another IMer previously mentioned.

__________________
India is the great Yin-Yang. Amazing lightness, equally amazing darkness. Wrapped up to make one complete whole.

Rob_The_Pom

Cheeky bu99er! (Only kidding).
Unfortunately, I'm currently researching into cultural issues in English Language Teaching, so I can't really get away from it. I generally don't subscribe to the more Marxist-based rhetoric within the literature, but this is one area where I do. I can't say I've read any of Ms Roy's articles on the matter, my beliefs on this are developed from the application of the theories of the likes of Robert Phillipson and Alistair Pennycook.
Of course those taking the jobs are happy to conform to the expectations placed upon them, but that could be considered self-imperialism.....
Another issue altogether.



Oh, just a question for Hermes - are you a qualified EFL teachers? From researching the ads having a CELTA, TESOL or TEFL is required for the call centre jobs, at the very least - Most of them seem to ask for Masters.

Sama

Rob, have you ever been to America? Do you have any idea how many accents we have here, not just around the country, state to state, but within a big city? I can tell if someone is from Brooklyn, New York or Long Island, New York. There's a big difference between a Texas accent and a Mississippi accent, and they are both southern US accents. I'm from the south side of Chicago and I know when I am speaking with a north sider. It has nothing to do with "linguistic imperialism", it's all about the Benjamins -- nothing personal, just business. Linguistically speaking, I doubt it will ever become McWorld.

I saw a public television propram about call centers in Bangalore, and the linguistic emphasis was trying to make the operators sound American "Midwestern", which is basically no accent, or at least a very "flat" accent.

Many people change the way they speak depending on the public audience, a private audience is a different thing -- then it becomes "ya wan fries wid dat cuz I'm goin bayou? we gonna eat den in da fron room?"

__________________
My India, 2005-2008
BE THE REVOLUTION