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Week of December 11, 1995: Finding Work in Prague
Finding work is not nearly as difficult as finding a convenient place to live in Prague. In fact, job opportunities abound for foreigners all over the former Warsaw Pact countries.
The best advice I can give is: start your own business.
Rugged individualism hasn’t been given such a free license since the Wild West days of America. The starting capital necessary to found even a capital intensive business such as a restaurant or a club is much lower than in the West. Dig up some money, bring it over, and find a Czech partner who you can trust.
But if you have to work for somebody else, expect much less pay than you’re accustomed to. Correspondingly, the cost of living is much, much lower than in the West while the standard of living (believe or not) is roughly about the same, if not better! It’s easy to live off of 250 to 500 USD per month. The average Czech salary is still around 200 USD per month.
Specialist work, from accounting to engineering, for big international firms is more rare to come by these days, but if found will render you among the wealthiest of Prague’s laborers.
The easiest work to come by is English teaching.
If you work for a language school, anticipate your pay to range from 2 to 5 USD per hour. Many schools provide free housing as a bonus and perhaps even a monthly public transportation pass.
Teaching privately is much more lucrative and relies merely upon your familiarity with the city. Whether legitimate or working under the table, you can expect between 4 and 12 USD per hour for your work, depending on whether you’re teaching an individual or, say, a group of bankers. If you’re lucky enough to land a 12 USD per hour teaching job with a bunch of bigwigs, realise that this will make you a very affluent man or woman in these parts.
An easy way to land a lucrative private teaching job is to contact the Prague Teacher / Student Liaison Service (69 24 267 or fax: 69 24 189) Taborska 48, Prague 4. The Prague Teacher / Student Liaison Service consigns teaching assignments out to private teachers who then teach at the home or the business of their clients rather than in a classroom. Hourly pay rates are usually much higher than the rates offered by language schools and the Liaison Service does all the search work for you, hooking you up individuals and, when available, with the big fish of the Prague business community.
But language schools are great way to start until you become a thoroughly conditioned Prager.
Following is a list of educational institutions (in order of size) offering work for English teachers (note: for a completely comprehensive list of language schools in Prague where you can teach, refer also to the "Learning the Language" page):
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