tpw21

What sort of work is it? Teaching English?

mah88

Yeah. It's the only sort of work that I can find in Italy.

tpw21

Almost all English teaching jobs in Italy are going to have that contract until they’re not able to - i think there are only a certain number of years they can use it though. If you’re looking to work in Italy as a teacher you’re either going to have to accept those contracts or open a P.IVA.

mah88

I might as well give up looking for work in Italy then since teaching is my plan B and my Italian isn't fluent.

tpw21

Unfortunately it’s the reality of the situation but they’re fine as a starting point if you’re desperate to live here, especially if the school will give you a better contract after a few years.

Have they said if you’d have a fixed monthly salary? I’d give it a go, personally…my first job here was TEFL in Sicily but now run my own business in something different.

modicasa

I taught on CO CO CO and CO CO PRO contracts when I was teaching. It was like being self employed in the UK. You dont get sick pay and obviously, given the fact that you dont work from June to September, you dont get holiday pay either. But mother tongue English teachers are too valuable to lose to the competition, so (in my experience) you get paid if you're working for a smaller school. The teachers who had problems with wages were those who worked for the big franchised language schools which seemed to work more like a pyramid scheme.

daniel_t

You don't need any Italian at all to teach English. It might help if you teach low levels (A1 and A2) to understand a bit of Italian, or if you teach Young Learners.

I second tpw21 - give it a go, mah88. You haven't got anything to lose, and one thing may lead to another.

tpw21

I never had issues with getting paid and i received a fixed amount each month. There was a set number of hours we had to do in a year and most of the time most teachers would get paid extra because they’d end up doing a few over that. It’s hard work with the late finishes but it’s all about getting a foot in the door and actually living and working in the country.

daniel_t

Hearsay or not, I remember reading a blog article a couple of years ago. It was written by an expat wife from the States. With a low level of Italian language knowledge, her Ivy League degree certificate was worth literally nothing. Job centres here in Italy referred her to cleaning or service jobs.

English teaching jobs are decent for people from the Anglosphere who don't speak Italian. The labour market here is less skilled, less flexible and more precarious than those in other developed countries.

There seems to be less social stigma in Italy regarding unemployment, idleness or claiming benefits too. Correct me if I'm wrong - that's just my partial understanding of the country.

philat98

Yes nobody seems to care if you are unemployed in Italy. I have been unemployed for 12 years and nobody suggested taking up work. Unemployment benefits are very poor too.

Lorna at Vicenza

WHAT unemployment benefits? I lost all of my contracts in Covid and couldn't even claim the sum whatever whatever €600 I can't remember because I own my house so my ISEE isn't at destitute levels. I signed up to the Centro Per Impiego as a disoccupata after hearing that they might have some job offers not advertised elsewhere and all I got was spam and bollocks from them. I did get a really informative email all about free classes for the unemployed to better their job opportunities. The class was BEGINNERS ENGLISH.

philat98

Yes in Italy the job centre isnt likely to find anything. In the UK they used to hand out terrible jobs. They had the reddito di cittadinanza for a while but Meloni has killed it off. It doesnt help that a lot of Italians dont pay tax.

daniel_t

My mum is earning as much as I generally do, but she's only working part-time (50% full-time scale) in Manchester! I suspect an average worker can earn more in a developing country than in Italy.