Chungdahm Learning (CDI) – Seo-gu: Tanbang-dong, Daejeon

A cautionary tale about Chungdahm Learning Institute (CDI):
If you are applying for a position with this company, please be aware that, aside from all of the regular and extremely frustrating and time-consuming hoops you must jump through just to teach in Korea, you will be expected to write an essay, prepare a video introduction, and study the company quite extensively before even getting onto an airplane. Immediately after your flight into Korea (for which you must pay), you must complete a fairly gruelling week of training which includes several written tests and a lot of teaching role plays with your fellow trainees. Up to this point, the requirements for solidifying your position with the company are intense, but certainly not impossible, and some might even deem neccessary in order to prevent inappropriate teachers from slipping through the cracks (and for anyone who has worked with inappropriate teachers, you know how important this can be!). The issue with CDI (in my experience) is that at the end of training, your hard won position can be plucked from your hands by some complete stranger from head office for something as simple as you not entirely grasping the Chungdahm way of teaching to their satisfaction in one week.
CDI has a VERY specific way of teaching, which may feel quite alien to some teachers who have their own tried and true methods of teaching, and could take some perfectly acceptable teachers a bit longer than one week to master. That matters little to the powers that be in this company. If they decide that you are not fit to walk the hallways of their prestigious hagwon, you will be asked unceremoniously to leave without being given any kind of chance to prove your merit and potentially without fully understanding what went wrong. This means that, not only did you waste countless time and money preparing and sending all of your pertinent information to different parts of the world (depending on where you live), but you are now stuck in Korea with no possibility of airfare reimbursement and another flight ticket home to add to your costs. Chungdahm has no obligation to you, as no contract has been signed, and they are not out of pocket one penny for your trials. You may think that this probably doesn’t happen very often, but the statistic is that 85% of Chungdahm trainees pass. That means that 15% of each group of hopeful candidates get put in this unfortunate situation, and not one of these individuals will think it will happen to them.
Fortunately for me, I was able to attain another position with a completely different kind of school after several job interviews and lots of inquiries that I couldn’t answer as to why I had so quickly been back on the job market after my original commitment to CDI. I could truthfully answer them by explaining that my commitment to CDI had never wavered, but their commitment to me had never existed.