Why We Built YouTeacher (And Why It Took 20 Years Too Long)

It was around 3am when I finally said it out loud.

I'd been scrolling through Dave's ESL Cafe — again — trying to find a decent teaching job posting in Nanjing. And it hit me: this website looks exactly the same as it did when I first used it in 2006. Same layout. Same clunky search. Same wall of text with no way to filter by salary, city type, or school category.

That was 20 years ago.

I've been teaching English on and off in China for over six years over a twenty year period. I've watched the country change dramatically. I saw the smartphones come and then their apps, the infrastructure, the way people live, and yet the platforms teachers rely on to find work here are stuck in a time capsule. Dave's ESL Cafe. SeriousTeachers. The same sites, the same problems.

Nobody had bothered to build something better.

So we did.

The Problem with ESL Job Boards in China

If you've ever looked for an ESL job in China, you know the drill.

You open six different tabs. Dave's ESL Cafe. SeriousTeachers. Teach Away. EChinaCities. A few Facebook groups. You spend an hour cross-referencing listings that might be duplicates, outdated, or...worst case...outright scams.

There's no salary information. No way to filter by city. No indication of whether the school is legitimate. You're essentially applying blind and hoping for the best.

Teachers get burned this way. It happens every year. Someone moves halfway across the world for a job that didn't match the contract, or disappears entirely before they arrive. And the platforms? They take zero responsibility.

This is the state of ESL recruitment in 2026.

What We Set Out to Build

The idea behind YouTeacher.org is simple: one place, all the jobs, with the information you actually need.

We aggregate listings from the major platforms — EChinaCities, SearchAssociates, Dave's ESL, Teach Away, SeekTeachers, and TEAST — so you're not bouncing between six tabs anymore. Everything is searchable in one place, with real filters: city, salary range, school type.

But aggregation was just the starting point. The bigger goal is transparency.

Teachers deserve to know what they're applying for before they apply. That means salary visibility on every listing. That means verified schools. That means a community of people who've actually been there and can tell you what to expect.

Who's Behind This

My name is Pete. I'm an IELTS teacher based in Nanjing, and I've been living and working in China on and off since 2006.

My co-founder Mojo was actually my former grade 10 student from 2010-2011. He is a developer based in Toronto who shares one core belief with me: the ESL job market in China is broken, and it's broken because nobody with the right combination of technical skill and ground-level experience has tried to fix it.

I bring the teacher's perspective. I know what it's like to show up at a school that looked good on paper and wasn't. I know how to read a Chinese contract (sort of). I know which cities are genuinely good for foreigners and which ones will grind you down. I know that WeChat, DiDi, and Alipay aren't optional extras... they're survival.

Mojo brings the engineering. The platform you see at YouTeacher.org is modern, fast, and built with teachers in mind... not employers, not advertisers.

We're not a recruitment agency. We don't take a cut of placements. Teachers use YouTeacher free, always.

We Also Wrote the Book

One of the first things I built personally wasn't a job board feature... it was a guide.

Because finding the job is only half the problem. The other half is actually surviving your first few months in China: setting up WeChat Pay, getting a VPN that actually works, ordering food delivery without speaking a word of Mandarin, figuring out how to send money home.

That's why I wrote Living in China: A Real-World Guide — a 155-page handbook built on six years of actually living here. Not visa bureaucracy or apartment hunting theory. The practical, phone-based stuff that nobody tells you before you land.

It's free. You can download it here →

This Is Just the Beginning

YouTeacher is live now. We have over 2,000 jobs aggregated from across the major platforms, searchable by city, salary, and school type. You can create a free account, save jobs, and start exploring.

What's coming next: verified school badges, teacher reviews, salary data by city, and a community layer where teachers who've been there can help teachers who are about to go.

If you're considering teaching English in China... or you're already here and want a better way to navigate the job market... this platform is for you.