The Learning Lab

1.0

16 Mar 2019

Recommend

CEO approval

Business outlook

Pros

- High starting pay for fresh grad (but you work weekends) - Well-stocked pantry - Lovely colleagues - Relatively short bond period (1 year) - Get recognised with $20 worth of vouchers if a parent compliments you through official channels - The TLL name really means something in the private education sector, so you can use TLL as a training ground if you are looking to stay in that sector longterm (I’ve had recruiters for private schools/international schools/enrichment centres approach me with job offers despite not having worked that many years in TLL)

Cons

*To ensure accuracy, I have asked teachers based across almost every single TLL centre, of different levels in seniority, and teaching different subjects, and almost everyone agreed with the following observations, so this negative review is not based on a one-off personal experience. ** Rumours have been swirling around TLL that employees are told to write good reviews of TLL on Glassdoor since the start of the year. If you look at the date of the glowing reviews, they all appeared in around the same time, so perhaps it might be best to take them with a pinch of salt. __________________________________________________ JOB PROGRESSION - Little career progression - Annual pay increment is way below the market rate - Low bonus (Performance bonus only: 1-2 months pay IN TOTAL for an entire year), no 13th month ————————— WORK PRACTICES - Common practice for sick leave to be rejected due to manpower constraints even if you have a valid MC (this is against the law). Raising this up to HR will only elicit gasps of “we didn’t know!” with no further actions taken - Common for cover classes in a different centre to be scheduled such that you have to skip meal breaks (1h for lunch and 0.5h for dinner) to travel ————————— SCHEDULING OF COVER CLASSES - You might get notified of a cover class the night before (good), a few hours before (okay), 15 minutes before (bad), or even 30 minutes AFTER class has started (terrible). For the bad and terrible scenarios, even if you have not prepared for the lesson, you are expected to show up and conduct a satisfactory class - Maximum limit for classes in a month is an average of 10.5 classes per week. However, a loophole is that 2T duties (assistant teacher duties for preschool classes) are calculated as 0.5 despite being of the same duration as a standard class - Your schedule will be extremely packed if you happen to take leave, e.g. 11 classes in a week that you work for 5 days versus having 10 classes in a week that you work for 3 days (2 days leave) ————————— OTHERS - Long notice period required (4 months if you are still under your one year bond, and 3 months if you’ve already finished your bond). - Hard to take leave during the more popular periods, and you are not allowed to take leave at all during the block-off periods (~3 a year)

The Learning Lab Response

Thank you for taking time to review The Learning Lab on glassdoor. We love the items you’ve mentioned such as the people, the caffeine, the competitive remuneration packages and the strong brand and different learning opportunities that come with it. We thank you too for the constructive feedback that you have provided. At TLL, we are committed to provide a competitive remuneration and bonus scheme that will attract, retain and reward high-performing employees. Besides practising a pay for performance compensation policy, we also conduct annual salary survey to ensure that our employees remuneration continue to remain competitive relative to the industry. It is not standard practice for us to reject an employee’s sick leave. Our planning team always strives to look for cover teachers in the event that regular teachers are not feeling well. The situation you had indicated could be unique but your feedback is valuable to us and we will definitely look into it Improving our teachers’ work conditions (minimise straddling and cover classes) is something our CEO, Dave, is committed to. That is why we have recently introduced quite a few measures to improve teachers’ work conditions such as their work schemes, leave policies, increased teaching resources, etc. With incremental improvements that the management put in place, we have seen the best teacher retention on record last year. Change and improvement take time and we are ever grateful for teachers like yourself who work hard through it! We welcome you to join us at one of the upcoming Q&A sessions for staff as that may be a great platform to share views and ideas or clarify any doubts. Alternatively, please feel free to speak to HR about your concerns and suggestions. Your feedback is greatly appreciated as they provide an opportunity for us to improve further. Finally, people are truly the asset of this organisation, making the difference in and out of class. This is why we encourage all staff to be a part of The Learning Lab’s success by becoming a TLL ambassador, sharing positive experiences that we have so that we can attract more ‘A’ players and continue to drive the quality of what we do Regards, HR

0/5 stars: Terrible, don’t trust the glowing reviews - Teacher The Learning Lab Employee Review

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