Instructors in the Kyoto area have not been paid.

Haha, my Japanese friend just took a Chinese test there today. He said he didn’t even know anything about this. Seems like NOVA is gonna implode soon.

its a very slow titanic.you can see what’s going to happen but know one wants to believe it!

A friend of mine working near Hiroshima is holding out hope that his new school won’t be closed (because it’s in a large city). They should all get out now.

http://jimvsworld.blogspot.com/2007/09/no-you-pay.html

I’d still be surprised if Nova went under. I think they are going to have to close the less profitable branches and the locations they opened mainly to flood the market and drive out mom and pop schools but they will consolidate and keep their main branches. I believe they probably won’t have to pay back as many contracts as long as they keep enough schools open to reasonably accommodate those who had signed up at other locations.

This situation isn’t as disastrous as it sounds though (at least not yet). While it is possible that they have to delay paying because they lack funds, it’s also possible this is related to the fact that Nova pays on the 15th of each month and that is a Saturday this month. What is more, it’s a 3-day weekend which means the earliest they may have been expected to pay (unless they decided to pay a day early on the 14th) would have been September 18th.

Nova has always done this bit where you are paid two weeks after the end of the pay period. That is, they pay you for the first to the last day of the previous month on the 15th day of the following month. You’re always two weeks behind until you quit at which point they pay you all you are due. They do this so they can keep your money longer but also to discourage people from bugging out without notice. This applies both to foreign employees and Japanese.

Clearly though, this is not a good sign. If it is related to holding the cash a few days longer, it could get worse and worse as time goes by until you’re getting paid later and later all the time and eventually you don’t get paid at all. However, the person who felt the Japanese government would do anything about this has a relatively inflated sense of how the Japanese regard individual rights. They won’t bother to involve themselves if a bunch of gaijin don’t get paid and they don’t care about how this affects perceptions of Japanese abroad (not that it would as most people back home have no idea about this language school business).

This situation isn’t as disastrous as it sounds though (at least not yet).

Not to mention, NOVA has lent out millions of its own shares as collateral for short term loans. When those loans could not be repaid, the formerly OTC shares went into the open market at loss. Who is going to help them financially with that sort of record?

I can say that because there is a possible logistical explanation. That is, all it takes is one grunt somewhere who sat on his (or her) hands on a 3-day weekend with a payday on a Saturday to push payday over into the next week. This is a possibility.

If it isn’t what happened, then it is as bad as it looks.

People are just a little too eager to dance on Nova’s grave. It’s not that I think that it can’t or won’t happen nor that I might not be one of the ones who would experience schadenfreude if it did but rather that the hastiest conclusion isn’t always the correct one. It may indeed be correct but I think there is still a possibility someone dropped the ball.

Either way, the manner in which they are dealing with these problems sounds just a bit shady and unscrupulous.

Bummer.

I think the lack of English language proficiency sometimes keeps excellent Japanese students and scientists from making an international impact. One English language school less would not be helpful. How good is the instruction in these schools?

All I know is I didn’t get paid on friday and was given a bad excuse which was different from what other teachers have reported(the excuse that is). My landlord came by this morning and said that NOVA hadn’t paid the rent and wanted to know if we knew why. We told him to complain to NOVA and stop rent to them. I am waiting for a paycheck on tues hopefully and then I am gone. The company may make it through this but why bother to wait and see they have already lost any trust I might have had. It is simply not worth the risk.

Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?…

I work for NOVA and I can say that the only instructors who got paid are those who work in Osaka and Tokyo. Any branch outside these areas didn’t get their wages also the management haven’t been paid (inculding Osaka and Tokyo) and the Japanese staff haven’t been paid for a couple of months.
I do think the Japanese government will help although not as a gesture to the foreign staff but to save themselves a lot of grief from the students who will lose a lot of money if NOVA folds.

If their practices don’t protect students in the first place, what makes you think they’ll help the instructors?

Hi!
I was scheduled to depart for Japan on Tuesday Sept 18th. They called me this past friday before my departure to give me three options.
1. cancel my job altogether
2. delay my departure
3. go anyway and take a risk

It would seem the recruiting staffs outside of Japan have also not received pay.
I chose to delay… I’m not finding it very encouraging to continue with them though. I’m looking elsewhere in case.

Hmm… I’m a Nova teacher and I don’t have any worries whatsoever. I came to Japan to have a fun experience teaching people and experiencing Japan. And I also was drawn to the short working hours. I only work 30.7 hours per week but make not only enough money to live, but enough to send back ($400 per month for old school loans) and take several international vacations. See, the trick is to not squander your money going out drinking multiple times per week. You know, I don’t even take out money on the day I get my pay. I can wait. See, I’m not just living from paycheck to paycheck but I’ve done something quite amazing…it’s called saving, and it’s possible even with a 30.7 hour work week.

Most of the people who hate Nova and say that companies that only hire people with degrees in education and prior experience probably don’t have that degree and experience, and Nova was the only company that would take them…a company that would give them their break. I’m in that category. I don’t have an education degree, but I think I’ve been a damn good teacher.

I don’t believe that Nova will go under. It WILL shrink and change, though. If it does actually go under though, then my time in Japan will have come to an end. And I’ll be able to look back at it and say that it was an interesting experience. At the end, that’s all anyone should care about.

Does anyone have links to other news stories or discussions about the NOVA situation? So far the only ones I’ve seen are on this site. I’d really like to hear more about it. There is no talk about this at all in Canada, that’s for sure… I’ve been trying to get information since Friday.

I am scheduled to leave on October 16th. My CoE is currently on its way and my plane ticket has been purchased for a month.

I will be eating the cost of my ticket and watching my CoE expire.

Unfortunately, I do not have marketable Japanese language skills, so taking my Visa and running with it does not appear to be able to net me any possibilities. I tried looking into other options, but frankly, the only comfortable solution I found was to remain here and find a way to visit Japan sometime in the future.

Quite frankly I have no faith in Nova and if they so happen are able to pull a miracle out of nowhere and survive, I will never apply to work with them again — new management or no. It is a different ball game when looking at working at a company in a different country.

I did, in fact, speak with my recruiting office, however the lady I spoke to was more interested in finding out how I knew what I did so quickly than in really providing a comprehensive answer.

It completely sucks, it hurts a lot but frankly, I think I made the best possible decision. I would not risk anything with Nova right now. And those people who do not believe that Nova will go under, or who believe their jobs are safe are deluding themselves.

I highly empathize with those in my position, but hey, small consolation right now, but at least we found this out BEFORE getting over there and facing Nova going under and not paying us. I’d rather eat the cost of my ticket than get all of the way over there and be penniless in a month because I’d have to purchase a return ticket without ever having gotten paid.

I highly doubt that Nova is handing out their guarenteed interest free advances right now if they can’t pay their current employees on time.

D

hi,

mr.saruhashi sent a fax out yesterday saying that the refund liability had been sorted out (repayment schedule agreed upon) and that things were looking up from now. from next month, no more worries about pay, apparently. we’ll see…….

joseph

NOVA broke? Get a new job….down under.

I read on one of these boards that 5000 of the current Nova teaching staff are Australians. With this in mind, I thought I’d post on the ESL situation back home.

First thing you need to know is that there is a teacher shortage at the moment. Most schools are finding it hard to get the teachers they need. It’s been that way for a couple of years now, but the shortage has been particularly acute the last six months and will only get worse as the peak study season rolls around.

Although ESL teaching is quite different from Nova’s patented “4 bunnies in a box” approach, many of the things you picked in Japan will stand you in good stead back home. (For starters, ex NOVA-ites are usually pretty good at keeping a up conversation with low level learners and have usually picked up a fair bit of knowledge about how English works and how it can be taught).

Within Australia there are dozens of schools in each capital city: more than 100 in Sydney alone. The ESL industry in Australia is regulated by the Federal Government’s ESOS Act 2000. Aside from compulsory insurance to protect students if schools go under, schools are accredited by a body called NEAS that ensures schools, teachers and curriculum are up to scratch. You can get information/addresses on accredited schools from NEAS at http://www.neasaustralia.com

The reason for the teacher shortage at the moment is probably because the general job market is so strong. Schools are finding it difficult to get good teachers and some of them a resorting to poaching them off each other. Salaries are around $35,000 to $65,000 per annum (I think that’s 3,5000,000 to 6,5000,000 yen), depending on your experience and qualifications.

Speaking of which, to work at a NEAS school you will need a minimum of a Degree and a legitimate TESOL qualification (deemed to be a Certificate IV in TESOL or a University TESOL Post Grad Cert/Dip or an RSA CELTA). Once you have these things you can pick up work pretty easily. You can even get recognition for the work you did in Japan which should reduce the length and cost of getting a Cert IV TESOL through a process called RPL (recognition for prior learning). One Cert IV TESOL provider in Sydney is Greenwich College (www.greenwichcollege.com.au ) And there are others in NSW and interstate.

For jobs … you can approach schools directly (see the NEAS website) or contact job hunting sites like http://www.eslstaff.com who should put you in touch with jobs. General job hunting sites like mycareer.com or seek.com run ads too.

Non- Australian teachers can join in too. Pretty much all schools are happy to take native English speakers,a variety of accents is even viewed as a bonus. If you’re under 29 years old you can get working holiday visa unless you’re from USA (coz the US govt doesn’t like WH visas) or New Zealand (coz Bondi is a New Zealand suburb, so our Kiwi bretheren can live here anytime they like). You can get info from http://www.immi.gov.au/media/fact-sheets/49whm.htm

The teaching itself is pretty different from NOVA; students study for 20- 25 hours per week in mixed nationality classes of up to 18 students using a set curriculum and text books that werent published in the cold war. Most classes run five days a week from 9am to 3pm with an hour off for breaks. Decent employers usually pay for lesson preparation time (using a daily rate).

So why am I putting all of this down? Well, I used to work in Japan (including 12 months at NOVA) and I can appreciate the stressful feeling of working in a company that’s on the ropes. However the main reason is that I am now the director of an ELICOS College in Sydney and am finding it hard to get teachers – so if you’re thinking of calling it quits at NOVA, then get in touch! (blueterrace-AT-hotmail-DOT-com)

PS For stat junkies, you can see the size of the ESL market in Australia by looking at the government statistics http://aei.dest.gov.au/AEI/MIP/Statistics/Default.htm Students numbers are up in every market except Japan which experienced a 5% decrease (another sign the English bubble has broken??) . Another good site is English Australia http://www.elicos.edu.au

Nova is dying, haha, actually it’s already dead

OMG, I have not posted in my blog for quite some time, but this story is HOT HOT HOT and I just had to bash the shit out of this company. Well, they deserve it. The only sad thing is the 5% of people that work at Nova that actually got stuck in that company purely because they love living in Japan, and they actually have their head on strait are going to be out of jobs pretty soon. For the other 95%, they are a bunch of knuckleheads who don’t really deserve to stay in Japan. Most don’t even bother to learn Japanese, they hang out with their other Nova friends, basically reading scripts to students day in and day out thinking they are real teachers.

Anyways, enough bashing on them, I wish the best of luck to those screwballs and hope they didnt drink their entire salary and have enough for the plane home. さようなら.

Anyways, on to this shady ass company. Basically, they have been robbing the Japanese blind for so many years and the government had enough complaints to actually investigate their practices. Well to start, they would trick the students into signing these contracts signing over their sole for 3 years of half ass english lessons and 6000$US. They would tell them they could cancel their contracts if they didn’t like the lessons and so forth, however that was far from the truth.

They would level up their students when their ticket points were about to run out, hoping they would resign their contract for yet another year. Even though they were no were near the level they were already in. Just money money money.

Well so the government finds out their contracts were misleading. HAHA, and thats only the half of it, they should spend some time researching into their business practices how they treat their teachers. The government even found company written documents on procedures on how to handle problem students that complained about not being able to get their refund, and psychological ways of dealing with students to keep them on their contracts or to rebuttal their complaints. It was like Hitler planned out and mapped this company and then he let a bunch of chimpanzees carry it out.

So what did the government do, they slapped Nova with penalties, such as, NO advertisements for a duration of severals months to a year, they couldn’t sign any students up for long term debt of like 6000$ for bullshit english lessons.

Well, this was basically Novas bread and butter that kept it alive, it was always playing with students money that had not been earned yet. Then came the court ruling which ruled in favor of the students vs. Nova and gave the students rights. They were now able to cancel their contracts and request a full refund of their remaining hours of instruction. UH OH, now Nova loses more money. To top it off, the government (god bless them) took it a step further and said, look, your pathetic classes aren’t going to qualify for government sponsored education, which was a healthy couple million dollars a year of sweet constant income. Most of those students never showed up anyways. haha. So what would Nova Japaneses staff do, they would double book those lessons anyways, banking on the fact that the government students wouldn’t show up. And when they did they would just throw them in a lesson with someone that had paid for a 1-1 lesson (which is 3x the cost of a group lesson) and say, ahhh we are so sorry for this inconvenience. Thats just one example of the shady practices they do. Man, I can write an encyclopedia of them if I had all the time in the world. Already I have given 8 minutes to this article, I feel I have wasted enough of my life on it.

Well, here is why I don’t have much respect for those still working there. Not only are most of them without skills and any ambition or motivation, but if they didn’t see these signs of the company falling, they are complete idiots. It was only a matter of time, and most likely if they have been their over a year and still had an ounce of love for this company, they were simple purely incompetent and lacked the ability to get a job as a floor sweeper in a prison.

Well sure enough they were bound to lose money and go under, its amazing they have survived this long, mostly riding the backs of its own employees and exploiting them as much as possible. I feel really sorry for the people that just landed here, but I hope you have money and then you can find a real job and have a good quality of life here in Japan. Just find that job now, before your competing with 6,000 people.

Here is the latest news regarding the company. As of the end of September if they don’t completely just close shop, which I feel they just might, they will be closing down 200 branches out of the 600 they control. Mostly in Osaka and Tokyo areas. And this is not a restructuring decision, but a “hey we are getting evicted because we are some shady SOBS!” Yep thats right, Nova in all its pride decided lets just skip paying the rent on our schools, so at least the landlords are smart enough to say, you arent going to pay us in two months, you will be under the water by then, we are going to cut our loses of you not paying us one month and boot your ass out of here by the end of this month.

Then they didnt pay all the teachers salaries in branch offices, mainly out of the main city and suburbs, basically we pissed off people cant be heard and they pain goes silently. However, people joined together and started striking outside the NOVA OSAKA main office and demanded they get paid, especially since the entire 300 employees at the Multimedia Center (their largest location) were getting paid. So yes, in Nova fashion, they paid these teachers to shut them up and then said, hello upper management, your not getting paid. hahhaha, but did they tell them this was going to happen. Nope, they bank accounts just didnt have a deposit in it on the 15th of the month.

Again Nova style. did anyone bring upper management into a room and sit them down and say, sorry guys we are going to have to go without paying you this month, but here is our strategy. Nope, noting, zlitch. They just said NOTHING! I asked a friend of mine if he got paid, he said no. i said did they tell him anything, he said nope. I said, “did you ask your boss” and his response was “yeah, and he said he doesnt know anything either”. Great company!

And those guys are getting it worse, basically anyone above a teacher, so those guys that are called TI or AT or everything stupid title you want to call them. They are mostly people that have no management skills, have never had a management position, but are very obedient dogs (they do what they are told, if you missed the reference). They are so happy to have a position in management that they do it all for 100$ more a month. Yep, thats right, 100$ more a month than a regular teacher. To most people that would be an insult and you would say, thanks but no thanks and just walk out the door. It’s not because your greedy, but its purely an insult in my eyes. So I hope you saved those 100$ extra a month that you got as now its costing you your entire months salary, poor bastards. Well, if you happened to have saved every month you worked and you have been working for at least a year, that’ll give ya $1200, maybe you can live off of that for a couple weeks.

Well all in all, sarcasm aside, I feel bad for those of you out there that actually have a good head on your shoulders and really come to japan for the love of it and you simply just wanna live here and soak it up. I wish you the best of luck to find new jobs and get a better quality of life and a more stable one. For the rest of you knuckleheads, have a safe flight home, and just appreciate the fact that you were able to live in this beautiful country.

well put anthony. i guess outside of the big cities you meet more serious teachers than the typical drink themselves to sleep everynight of the week.

did you hear if anyone got paid on the 27th, as monkey bridge promised??

im an at and as such havent been paid yet. im really glad that i didnt trust nova enough to only work for them (i started picking up part-time jobs everywhere i could about two years ago, couldnt figure out why no one else wanted to, also). without nova my salary goes down by about 60%. but its still annoying. itll take time to get up to a decent amount again. i am kind of glad though, ive been in this company way too long, time to get up and start using my own legs again!!!

They also stopped paying people’s final salary payment. If you leave Nova don’t expect to get any money for the last month that you worked. I’m currently asking my Japanese wife to help me get legal advice as I’m not letting them off.

Is there any Canadian guy worked in NOVA?
if he/she is living in Nagoya or other city difficultly,
he/she can contact me,
before he/she gets a new job,
he/she can share one of three bedrooms, it is free.