macatack007

Hello all.

New to this site and would like some info on the job front in Thailand.

I am currently a prison officer here in the U.K and I am currently studying a Diploma in Occupational Health & Safety, (this is equivalent to an A+) I then want to move on and study NVQ 5 in Health & Safety.

What I would really like to know is how difficult would it be to obtain a job in the health and safety industry out there in Thailand.

Any advice appreciated.

scot47

I think you would have to learn Thai.

macatack007

Quite a hard language to learn so I hear scot47

bakedbean

Thought you were moving to NZ

macatack007

Keeping my options open if all goes down hill. Gotta have a back up plan.

scot47

Tonal language like Chinese. Very difficult to achieve competence.

Jackwow

If you need to speak Thai to do the job then the chances are it will be a job restricted to Thais only?

scot47

i do not think there will be many jobs in this field for Farang.

Jackwow

Tonal yes, but a fairly simple language and far easier to learn than Chinese.

nonthaburi

sounds about right .

plus health and safety in Thailand ! bit of a contradiction there methinks

nonthaburi

only 76 letters in Thai , I think Chinese has about 10,000 characters or something ridiculous , but you " ONLY " need to know a few hundred to get by !!

bakedbean

Yes I was thinking that too

nonthaburi

It always made me laugh catching a train in Thailand . At every station there is a big sign saying ' Safety First ' . It always made me think " so why do you leave the doors open on the train then !!! "

wolf5370

OK. I think your best bet would be as a health and safety inspector working directly for a foreign firm. There are many electrical (almost all the worlds Hard Drives are made in Thailand for example) companies and other manufacturing companies (Coke and Pepsi; car manufactures both Japanese and western; etc). This will not be an easy task, you will probably need some industry experience first.

It is very unlikely that you would get offered a job by a Thai company or the state here - as it is a job a Thai can do, and thus hard to justify to the state why a foreigner is required and hard to justify the hoops and costs (including minimum wage for foreigners being many times than of a Thai) to get a work permit for you.

Having said all that, there is the possibility of doing the H&S training. This would perhaps be a different tack, but easier to do IMO. There is also the possibility (with a cheap 4 week course - couple of hundred quid say - to obtain an in-country TEFL certification) to teach English as part of the H&S course - that being business English with respect to H&S (yada-yada). This sways it towards the requirement. It is most likely then that you could get a job with a good language school and specialise with hotels and industry and run courses on both. Get known in the industry and you may get taken on. (I know of a guy here for example that used to teach English for a language school - he did a set of courses for a national hotel chain to teach staff, basic customer interfacing English, and the management, business English - after a year of courses, he was hired directly by the hotel and ended up a hotel manager for a number of years).

Contacts mean more than anything here. Don't worry too much about the language (Thai) you can take courses once here, but for most roles you would be hired for, you simply wouldn't need it - although useful to speak the local lingo of course! I know people that have been here for 20 or more years and can barely order coffee in Thai (not because it's that hard - but because they are lazy and can get by without it). You will have seen this also in Saudi with expats - the locals you need to understand or talk to speak English well enough or you know someone that will do it for you.

wolf5370

Chinese is not a alphabet (presume we are talking about Mandarin) - it is pictographic (with some elements of phonic alphabet for spelling words without pictograms, like names). Thai does not have 76 letters in its alphabet either. It has 46, of which 3 are obsolete and one is rarely used (and often called obsolete too) - so 42. All of these are consonants and Thais do not count vowels in their alphabet. There are literally hundreds of vowels due to the fact that many are dipthongs and tripthongs and use combinations of up to four vowel (and even consonent) symbols - however around about 20 are generally used. Add to this tone marks (fir the 5 tones: Low, Rising, Medium or Normal, High and Falling), the three tonal classes (High, Medium, Low) and punctuation (spaces are the same as our fullstops/periods - they atso have symbols for "etc" to repeat a syllable, to make a letter (sometimes two) silent and so on - there is no exclamation or question marks though these have been somewhat adopted now from the western punctuation). There are no spaces between words in the same sentance.

The main difficulty with written Thai is learning to write (not read so much) - just to show how hard it could be the first 5 letters of the Thai alphabet (including an obsolete letter) is Gor Gai, Kor Kai, Kor Kwaht, Kor Kwai, Kor Rakung - transliterated they are usually written as: K , K, Kh, Kh, K. So, the first five letters are all K sounds (although really Gor Gai it is a hard G, it is shown as K in most phrase books etc due to the first one being written over a hundred years ago by a Dutchman). There are also no SH sounds, two TH sounds, and many S and T sounds.

Thai has pretty solid phonetic rules though (due to its tonality), with few exceptions, so once the rules are learned, the rest is easy (reading and verbal wise at least).