It Looks Good On A Resume

Not only is teaching English for a year abroad a worthwhile experience in its own right, it also allows you to develop a number of skills that are relevant in other field as well:

People skills/management skills
You will be interacting with many people every day: students, other teachers, and administrative staff. The majority of these people will come from a cultural and language background different from your own, and interacting in a professional but fun, positive, and motivating manner requires sensitivity and “emotional intelligence”. Your classes may include judges, other teachers, secretaries, high school students and lawyers, many of them older than you, and you have to manage and organize the group.

Communication skills
As above, you will be communicating with people whose first language is different than yours, but further you will be thinking critically about the rules that apply to your own language and explaining those rules and other concepts to people, in different ways to suit different learning styles. If someone doesn’t understand, you have to explain in another way or try to see it from their perspective to find out what was missed.

Thinking on your feet
Planning represents a huge part of any teacher’s schedule, but almost regardless of how much you plan, you will have to tweak something depending on how things unfold in the classroom. Students may be bored or tired or especially interested in something you hadn’t anticipated, and you have to decide on the spot what to do. You may plan a lesson and find that the students did the same activity with another teacher yesterday. You may save you work on your laptop at home but find no printers working when you get to the school half an hour before class. This is the ability to assess a situation, make an appropriate decision (or change what you planned without getting flustered) and carry it out.

Learning and applying a methodology
While, fairly enough, many people express concern that a four-week course is not a lot of training, most TEFL courses present the main components of a methodology that, if a teacher follows in principle and remains committed to reflecting on and learning from his/her experience, can often lead to satisfied students who improve their English language skills. In essence, you are learning a certain method and applying it in practice long-term. You receive training and progress to working independently; you can’t turn around and ask a colleague what to do in the middle of a class.