Nova is dead: When will the dust settle?

I had planned on going to Japan to teach English early next year on a working holiday visa. I didn't necessarily want to teach at Nova - but the recent declaration of bankruptcy has totally destroyed the English teaching job market in Japan.

I'm sure something similar to this has happened before - how long will it take for the dust to settle and make things realistic for English teachers to get jobs again? I will be going to Japan with an English teaching certificate, but not a degree (1 year of university experience).

My understanding is that there are about 4,000 unemployed English teachers now due to the collapse of Nova.

Opinions, anyone?

Nova is not exactly dead, and everyone is not unemployed. What is happening is a restructuring of the company. There is a need for the company no doubt about that part, its just a matter of getting back on track, now that the upper level people have left or been fired, the creditors will want to rebuild the company.

Nova owes almost 50 billion yen to creditors. Anyone who takes Nova on will have to pay back all the student refunds as well as all the unpaid salaries- the outstanding salaries alone are estimated at about 6 billion yen. That is a sizeable debt for any company to take on, and with a shattered brand image I don't see Nova recovering. I think they will declare proper bankruptcy before the end of the year, probably much sooner. Nova's collapse isn't comparable to the Fujiya or Snow Brand scandals because although the image and profits of those companies took a blow they still had an intact corporate structure.

If they do manage to restart, it will be in a much, much smaller form- possibly the multimedia center in Osaka could be revived in a small way to continue the online lessons, but less than 10 percent of Nova teachers were employed at the MM centre.

As for something like this happening before, other schools have failed, but never a school as large as this one- at one point Nova had more than 50 percent of the eikaiwa market. If Nova does declare bankruptcy it will actually be the biggest consumer wipeout in post-war Japanese history.

This all means that early next year won't be such a good time to be looking for English teaching work here- still a bit early I would say, although you might be lucky with hiring for the new school year which starts in April. I would give it at least 6 months for the market to settle down- hard to say what will happen to the market now- there may actually be a shortage of teachers at some point as there is a history of people coming over to work with Nova and then jumping ship to work at other schools or become ALTs after a few months to a year, which means that Nova has supplied Japan with a lot of its English teachers in the past.

That supply will now dry up, possible leaving other schools with a shortage of people with visas already in Japan to pick up- that's where you with your WH visa come in!

It's hard to say at the moment anyway- against all expectations Nova may actually pull through in some form. I know that a sizeable number of teachers are already heading home, so Nova would have to do a lot of rebuilding if they did find a sponsor.