DODEA vs Search Associates
About 5 years ago, our family accepted International teaching jobs in Tunisia, North Africa through a recruitment company called Search Associates. We had a great experience living in Tunisia for 2 years before moving back to the States. It’s been great being back home in Kansas, around family and friends, but we’ve had the itch to go back overseas again. This time around, we decided to apply for teaching positions through the Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA), working with kids of military families. The hiring process has been different in a lot of ways so I thought I’d create a post to outline the similarities and differences.
Time Frame for Hiring
With Search Associates, it’s best to get your application in by September or October. Once you get approved, your profile is visible to hundreds of schools around the world. Each day you get an update of new positions listed. Since I am qualified to teach art and upper elementary, those are the position updates I received. Then it was up to me to reach out to schools that I was interested in. If they liked what they saw, they would set up an interview. When we used Search Associates, we had many interviews in October and November, before getting hired in early December. I liked that they hired so early because it gave us 8 months to prepare for the big move.
With DODEA, they don’t start hiring until Winter/Spring. We got our applications submitted in August, but they didn’t get approved until February. Unlike Search Associates, you don’t get to see which schools are hiring. The only sign you get is when you receive a referral email. These are emails telling you that you are being put on a list given to principals and they could potentially choose you for an interview. Justin received 4 referrals in February and out of those only one place requested him for an interview. We decided to turn down the offer to interview because we weren’t sure it was the right opportunity for us. After February, we didn’t hear anything from DODEA until May. I had basically given up hope that anything would happen, but then in May, out of nowhere, Justin got the referral, the interview request, and the offer for a SPED Assessor job in the Netherlands!
Support
With Search Associates, you are assigned to a recruiter. Ours was “Dr. Bob” and he was great. He sent us emails with updates, answered all of our questions and held our hand throughout the hiring process. There is a portal/ website with all the schools’ information as well and you can clearly see who’s hiring and who to contact.
With DODEA, you are not given the same level of support. No one is assigned to help you. It’s very difficult to find anyone to contact to answer questions and overall, the process isn’t very transparent. It’s more of a “ Don’t call us. We’ll call you” kind of feel. Most of the time, you are just in the dark, wondering if your application is being considered. The one thing that helped us get through it was the “DoDDS/DoDEA (Teacher Interested)” Facebook page. It’s a community of people who help answer each other’s questions about DODEA and I found the advice very helpful.
Couple Status
When you set up your account with Search Associates, you say if you have a spouse who is also looking to teach. When you do this, you are tied together and only considered as a couple. We never got interviews where only one of us was being interviewed. The schools only contacted us if they had a job for both of us.
In the DODEA system, you can list if you are a teaching couple, but that’s not really taken into account. Since Justin has the more in-demand job in Special Education, we figured he would be the one who got hired and we were right. I am still interested in teaching, but we will have to wait until we arrive where I can apply for a job as a local.
Locations
Search Associates has schools all over the world, 775 schools in 124 different countries to be exact. When we applied with Search Associates, we had interview requests from Jordan, Dubai, Tunisia, Indonesia, China, and more. You can list what continents you are interested in when you first apply. We checked all the boxes because we were open to what the universe had in store for us. I would have never imagined that I would have ended up in North Africa, but I did and I loved it.
DODEA operates 160 schools in 11 foreign countries, 7 states, and 2 territories. Because there are fewer schools, it’s a lot more competitive. We’ve heard from people who have been applying for years and still haven’t gotten in. There’s definitely some luck involved. Just like with Search Associates, you can indicate in your DODEA application if there are certain areas you don’t want to consider. We had to mark off a few because they don’t allow families to go to certain areas.
In general, we found more areas with higher travel advisories in the Search Associates schools. There were certain places we didn’t apply for because it didn’t feel safe enough for our family. DODEA on the other hand, has a lot of very safe locations like Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and The Netherlands. The European locations are a big reason it’s so competitive.
Benefits
Search Associates schools have a wide range of benefits depending on the school. The nice thing about the website portal is that it’s very transparent. You can click on a school and it will tell you how much money you can save and if they pay for shipping, housing, flights, etc. Some schools, especially those in Europe, you save little to nothing. Other schools, you can save up to $20,000, $40,000, $60,000, and in a few rare cases, $80,000. That’s not your salary; that’s what you save on top of your salary! When we lived in Tunisia, our salaries were pretty comparable to American teacher salaries, but we were able to save because the school paid for our housing, utilities, flights, and gave a moving-in allowance. Plus the cost of living is so much cheaper there so our money went further.
DODEA has some of the best benefits that a teacher can ever hope to receive- high salaries, housing and utilities paid for (only if working outside of the US), health insurance covered, and they will even ship over all of your belongings, plus a car! It’s one of the few jobs where you can actually save money in Europe.
To Sum It Up
I’m so glad our first experience was with Search Associates, teaching in an International School. We felt well-supported, saved a lot of money, had time to prepare for the move, and both of us got jobs. However, Tunisia has a level 2 travel advisory with some areas reaching up to a level 4: Do not travel (near the borders). We never felt unsafe, but the fact is that we were living in a 3rd world country and with that came some inconveniences and governmental issues.
For our second time living abroad, we wanted to go to a safer, more developed area and preferred Europe. The way to do that and still save money is with DODEA. It’s less supportive directly (but the community has been fabulous), more bureaucratic, and it’s a lot more competitive, but for us, it was worth it for the location and benefits. We feel lucky to be going on this new adventure.
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road 