Thailand: Your Overseas Trip Funded by Work
June 28th, 2009Working in the Land of Smiles as a foreigner usually means occupying an English teaching position. While there are well paid English teaching jobs in universities like Chulalongkorn or Thammasat, the vast majority of such positions are often poorly paid.
In fact, don’t anticipate a decent salary for any job requiring skills, teaching or not. It doesn’t sound very promising, but in reality if you mean to live in the Land of Smiles for a few years, such poorly paid jobs aren’t a worry since Thailand is a low- priced place to live, the infrastructure is the best in South East Asia, it’s a safe country, and there’s nonetheless every opportunity to further your career and get some useful work experience.
However there’s an obscured problem that slowly shows itself over time: so you’ve been working in Thailand for a few years, and you’ve gained decent work experience, your wage is low, but then again things are cheap in Thailand so that’s OK. HOWEVER, here’s the rub : You’ve been unable to actually BANK much money while you’ve been living in Thailand. The cost of air tickets look very expensive in comparison to your salary in Thailand. The cost of living in your home country starts to panic you when you compare your money earned in Thailand. This problem hits a lot of non-Thai nationals in Thailand a year or so after deciding to work there. Long- term future plans can often be put on hold since you don’t have the nest egg of money to put into action any plan like purchasing a property, buying a car, or getting married.
Consequently, key point : when considering working in the Land of Smiles, also remember that it is very difficult to bank meaningful quantities of cash when thinking about the prices of “back home”.
All the same, it’s not all about cash is it? You can gain a wonderful experience in Thailand, perhaps learn the language, make friends, go travelling around Thailand when you have time off work, and gain some invaluable work experience.
So what kind of job positions can you find in Thailand? Looking at jobs-quality.com - a website listing jobs in the Bangkok and Chonburi districts of Thailand - they have listed HR job positions, Admin job positions, engineering work placements in Thailand, safety officer job positions etc. Essentially the sort of job positions you’d discover in your home country. Even though the majority of these jobs may be looking for a Thai speaker, there are still English-speaking prerequisites for job posts within many multinational organizations established in Thailand.